My background with coding is moderate - just a few courses in which I had to code in first general year of engineering school and experience with things like MATLAB and Python to write scripts.
How hard/time consuming would it be for me to, using UE4, create a game solo that has mechanics such as: swinging a sword, blocking, dodging to the left or right, jumping over low swinging attacks by the AI etc?
I don’t know you but I know this: the average person has never even bothered to take engineering courses, or coding courses for that matter. You are therefore automatically 1 step ahead of the pack.
Here is what I would suggest. Start with 1 task at a time.
Make the character and customize the animation. Most of what you want to do can easily be done in blueprint in under a couple of ours once you have a through general understanding of the engine. You’ll only get a general understanding of the engine by jumping in and getting your feet wet.
All in all, starting from scratch, with proper dedication, a flaky background in trigonometry (meaning you don’t have to go and actually study what a cosine is like most people making games now a days :P), a few rudiments of asset design (what are Normal Maps? What are Armatures? How do you animate a character to make it move?, What are IK bones for?), you can easily achieve the task in a couple of weeks of 8h a day work…
There are tonnes of Youtube tutorials to follow that show you detailed/specific things. Naturally since you have a background of some sort in coding you might also catch on their mistakes and improve on their solutions as you go along…
You have some experience in coding, but what about the other stuff? How would you plan to get a rigged character model and all the other 3D models?
Good to hear - and yes the majority of stuff like making models and animations and using the actual engine all needs to be learned. My background just allowed for some overlap on some aspects
Hi there [USER=“3391543”]Shaniqua Jackson[/USER],
Sounds like you’re developing a Melee Combat System. Is it First or Third Person? First Person Sword Swinging Collision Detection and Animation can be very interesting to implement. There is no one ‘right’ to implement a Melee System, and I think there is plenty of room to experiment.
However…depending on what features you want to implement, It could take a lot of work and time to do it all from scratch. Possessing Programming Skills gives you a huge advantage as that is what it takes to create the game mechanics. You could also leverage your programming skill to generate content, animate entities/objects, program materials/visual effects and user interface.
I’m also a code-centric game dev. I’m developing a semi-ambitious Sci-Fi FTPS solo using my programming skills for all of the above. Part of my content creation strategy is to include in-game construction/customization tools to support player created content.
Additionally, I leverage UE4-compatible Content from various Marketplaces { 1, 2, 3 } to compensate for lack of a Art Dept. I use programming skills to modify Marketplace assets for uniqueness. Marketplace Vendors can be *silent *development partners helping with integration, bug fixes, and improved features. There is a lot of high quality Assets released in Unreal Marketplace for FREE.
You can also get tough questions answered on the UE4 Forums, Documentation, Answerhub, and Youtube. So, you are never really developing solo. Welcome to the UnrealEngine Community!
Thanks for the links - yes, I suspect I’ll need to do quite a bit of research. I think I was leaning towards 3rd person. I found some resources online - the hope is that enough people have done this before (a third person sword slashing/dodging game seems like it would be quite a popular project) that I don’t have to do too much completely from scratch but perhaps edit and modify existing stuff. Perhaps if I found implementation of a dodge roll it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to modify it to have 2 buttons for directional dodge rolls (left/right) or something like that and so on for the other mechanics.
Since you are fresh to Unreal Engine and game design, I would start by watching some of the YouTuber’s out there who do tutorial series on learning UE4. This method helped me a lot in the past when I was first learning the engine and game design and still does today when I don’t know how to do something.
I feel that you can definitely achieve your goals relatively soon, keeping in mind that there is a lot of free content out there to teach you how to use Unreal Engine and your prior coding knowledge. You just need to know how to find these videos, but there are resources out there to help you in most things.
Check out the following series by Virtus Learning Hub on making an RPG game:
Virtus is a great resource for beginners. In this series you can learn how to use a character model and animate it, health, cast spells, melee attacks, and simple AI, etc. Pretty much a solid foundation on how to start making a game. He also has a general UE4 tutorial series, where he just goes over the different parts of the Engine.
When you’re a little more advanced with using UE4 also be sure to check out Ryan Laley, he has great advanced tutorials. I’m going to link his playlist on creating AI Characters and Behaviors:
Third person Sword Slashing may be popular, but there are many different techniques for implementing the mechanics. Making the decision on which one to use or creating something different is where challenge is.
For example, I considered melee combat for my FTPS. My technique was to reuse the Firearm Weapon projectile/fx/damage systems. The concept was to fire tiny projectiles from the handle’s axis pointing up, during the swing. I believe i can do something interesting with collision detection and damage effects. For more dynamic animation, i was planning a IK system vs pre-recorded animations.
No matter what techniques you pick, It will be beneficial to get familiar with UE4’s Skeletal Mesh Animation Systems to create blendspaces/montages, statemachines, and notifies… to wire up animation to events.
For Dodge and Rolls, you could use a animation set like this…
You can find it here