MOBA + Racing? What?

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Hey everyone.

**First of all, some background.
**
Over the past few years, I’ve worked on a handful of games, and I even released one into the wild on iOS as my own. I’ve always worked with Unity, because honestly, I’ve been using it since version 2.6 (2009-ish) and I’ve gotten used to it.

Along came UDK, though. Being a long time fan of everything Epic Games (I still have my boxed Unreal copy), I immediately jumped on it. The things it could do, whooo man! Once the initial rush faded, I realized this wasn’t close to Unity at all, but a bulky beast. I’ve never gotten around to using the Unreal Editor back in the Unreal and DeusEx days, so UDK looked monumentally hard for me to conquer. So I left it out.

Unreal Engine 4 came out. I immediately shelled $20 and got crackin’. A sleek new interface, friendly controls, awesome graphics. I’ve struck gold! Or so I thought. Being used to do things the “Unity way”, UE4 still seemed like a tough hill to climb. I started by doing renders and moving scenes from VRay over to UE, but not much more. Blueprints seemed convoluted and I wasn’t ready to learn C++. So I left it out as well.

I continued with Unity up until, well… last week. I decided to launch UE and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. And let me tell you lads, I’ve never been happier. The things you’re about to see have been done entirely in Blueprints in less than a week. By a complete newbie.

On to the project…
**
I’m fully aware that I might not finish this or even get it to a decent prototype stage, but to me - right now - it’s all about learning. That being said, this half-*** prototype-thing is my attempt to mash together a genre at which I’ve never been good at (MOBAs) with a genre which I deeply love (racing).

This is what I’ve gotten so far, lads:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OOdkA2C8hso

So, in less than a week, UE has been able to teach me how to:

  • Create a vehicle
  • Tweak a vehicle
  • Add (up to) 4-player split screen
  • Create abilities
  • Do custom materials for the HUD (the cooldown clock thing)
  • Work with Physical Materials
  • Add ForceFeedback
  • Add pretty stop lights to my car
  • Do cool drifts
  • Get chicks (FEATURE NOT FULLY IMPLEMENTED)

I know this is not your average WIP post. It’s just one man’s journey from reluctant user to happy dev. And perhaps, on a deeper level, UE taught me how to give things a chance. To not shy away from things even if they seem difficult or sometimes insurmountable.

Thanks for listening

  • Alex
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Good to hear you are having a good time. I also switched from Unity to UE4 and I love it. It took me about 4 months to grasp the “Unreal” way and half of that time was spent fighting Blueprints until it finally clicked one day. Now I can honestly say I’m almost as efficient in Unreal as I ever was in Unity. Some things are harder, yet others are easier - It all depends on your project.

I also found the UE4 community to be really helpful, so feel free to post questions in the forums if you need help :slight_smile:

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Thanks, CoquiGames.

So far things are going great. I had to Google some of the stuff I couldn’t wrap my head around, but with the help of the community and the AnswerHub I got through.