Hello, I recently finished a tech demo in Unreal and tossed it up on GameJolt.
What
Desolate Cosmos is a small interactive tech demo I made to push my skills further in Unreal. It’s a short interactive narrative of an engineer arriving to a far out space station that society lost contact with. Much of the demo is exploration themed, with a number of robot characters for the player to talk to in hopes of finding out what happened.
I hope the lessons learned from this can help others who are looking to improve their skills in UE4.
Why
Desolate Cosmos is a personal project I treated like a game jam in order to learn other areas of UE4. I have worked with Unreal on and off for a few years, but there was a variety of skills that teammates usually covered instead. This project focused on a lot of the stuff I didn’t know and pushing myself forward.
The tech demo included skills like
- Level design & working with modular assets
- Creating custom materials
- Creating skyboxes
- Creating AI characters
- Creating dialogue and using the dialogue system
- Working with voice acting
- Creating custom subtitles
- Having a couple pre-programmed event-driven scenes that take place.
- Creating LODs, HLODs and proxy meshes
- Using cubemaps to create static textures I could use for proper reflections in a sphere capture
- Timed interaction to prevent players from accidentally talking to an NPC
- Custom shadows and lighting
- Level streaming
- Game icons (taskbar, loading and project icons)
- Common performance tweaks
Where
https://gamejolt.com/games/desolate-cosmos/346830
Post-Mortem
A write-up of what I built and how is here -
https://renardchien.github.io/DesolateCosmos-PostMortem/
The write-up includes a number of blueprint examples, lessons learned and general tips.
Update: Adding images after someone’s suggestion.
View of the Atrium
View of a Lab
View of another Lab
View of the Power Station
View of Engineering Bay
View of Farming Area
