Nine months ago, May of 2014 I started working on a game in Unreal Engine 4.
Today it is a mostly stable framework, featuring real time combat between large robots, with mediocre textures, and shambling animations, and occasionally a sound effect.
I have uploaded a video to youtube, it can be seen at: http://youtu.be/uwYhUBzY0Ag. Feel free to skip the first two minutes, pretty much just troop movement.
I am mostly pilfering ideas from Mechcommander, and a few newer strategy games. My goal is to make a fun game, and hopefully something that helps me get a job in the games industry.
So far its all sorts of a one man army sort of project. Its 100% blueprint at the time being, and mostly works. Hopefully I can get a few more hands on deck to help me turn it into something that is actually fun to play.
I may one day release it, not sure what I am going to do with it.
Not today though, its a mess of blueprint. Id want to squash more bugs and tidy it up a bit before letting other folk tinker under the hood.
Help would be much appreciated. I don’t have a recruitment thread up yet. Send me a PM with a bit of what you’ve done, and what you would like to do.
Not tons of new stuff, the 4.7 update broke a lot of things in my game. Mostly spent the last month or so cleaning up the major blueprint systems.
AI is about the only system that hasn’t received at least a good scrubbing.
Made a volume based flammable/destructible foliage system. Its not as easy to use as Epic’s foliage tool, but it seems to work well enough with a few thousand trees. Also added rocks, and brush with the foliage tool, as well as started on a grass layer for the terrain. The game world is finally starting to look close to what I want it to (southern Utah.)
No new video, but a few screenshots, and a compiled copy can be downloaded below. Figured since I was able to spend the month cleaning all the code, and squashing most of the bugs I may as well chuck it out there and see if anyone stumbles across an utterly game breaking bug.
I must say, for a one man job by someone who doesn’t make games for a living, this looks pretty bloody good. Trust me, I know my mech games. Check my imdb page for confirmation. Did you do all the modeling and texturing yourself? Keep it up! Cheers,
I can about count the assets created by other folk on one hand. Trees are from here: http://www.loopix-project.com/ The water plane is the one from Epic’s pack.
The rest is made by myself. Textures in Gimp/Photoshop, sounds in Audacity. The models are made in 3ds Max. I thiiink I may have made a rock or two in a knockoff of z-brush called scupltris.
The robots currently in the game are based off of art creating by other people for Battletech/Mechcommander, I plan on replacing them with models based on my own imaginings.
I’ve already lifted the legs off of one of them for its replacement. Its not textured yet, but it can be seen here: https://skfb.ly/DCXK
Thanks for the encouragement. I don’t plan on stopping till I either have myself a paying job doing this sort of thing. Or I figure out how to make money off of my game.
Was this the game where you could inject babies with performance increasing steroids/drugs, and watch their faces go all blue and distorted? Or am I thinking of something else?
Work progresses! The ai now has a working find cover function, so they sometimes grow a brain and take cover instead of standing out in the open getting shot at.
New video can be seen here: [video]BTCC 4-17-2015 - YouTube
Also added basic order scripting for ai, so they don’t just stand there like fools. The scout even caught my units off guard!
The art is better, rocks mostly. I fixed the UV seem that was causing wonky lighting on the rocks (you can see it in the screenshots above) and added lods to the smaller rocks burried in the ground so they perform better. Lods on the bigger rock cause all sorts of odd shading artifacts with ray-traced distance field shadows enabled, so no lods for them.
Id love to lod the folliage down to sprites, but all of my attempts are foiled by them being instanced static meshes, cant seem to find a way to access a mesh’s offset from its parent actor in the material system.
It’s nearing time to start on a messaging system so the units can give the player feedback, right now there is alot going on and very little is communicated to the player.
Questions/comments welcome.
