New to Unreal - Trying to build a ship battle mini game using a real cannon - I could use some help!

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Hi. I’m a themed experience designer (mainly escape rooms) and I have a project where guests will be able to aim a physical cannon at a projected screen and fire cannon balls at an enemy vessel. I have a little bit of experience with unreal, but that’s basically just the absolute basics. I was hoping to get some help to show me what I would need to do in order to accomplish this, it’s feasibility, about how many hours it’d be, cost to hire a programmer, etc. Off the top of my head, here are the things that I was thinking I would need:

  • Ocean water with waves,
  • Foggy Atmosphere (to conceal digital components)
  • Way to read the angle of the cannon(s)
  • Way to trigger the fire mechanism
  • Way to prevent multiple cannonballs from firing until they trigger some reload function
  • Preferably multiple cannons that can be controlled independently
  • animation of the smoke
  • animation of the ball flying through the air
  • animation of enemy ship taking damage
  • animation of cannonball splashing when they miss
  • animation of enemy ship firing its cannons
  • animation of them missing
  • animation of us getting hit (not sure what that would be)
  • preferably, have a thing that will cause a mechanism in the room to trigger (for example, if we’re hit we turn on we release smoke, or maybe a banner falls, or a beam “breaks”, etc.
  • sound design to make that all make sense
  • maybe have storm animation playing?

That’s where I’m currently at. I don’t have to use custom built meshes and generic sail ships would work fine. They would need to read as realistic (but can be hidden with fog a bit)

Thank you all in advance!

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There is great plugin for doing ocean and waves: OCeanology 5:

Foggy atmosphere is really easy just google for tutorials

For aiming cannos and firing you could use HTC Vive controlers, yes they require tracking statioins, but they are really accurate. Maybe there are other controllers from VR that can work without base stations

Or you can do aiming retro style. ie buttons for yaw and pitch of cannon. Or even create real cannon with hidden buttons. So player needs physically move cannon to aim. Then accuracy is not that important.

Preventing multiple fires from cannons is basic blueprint “script” just add some enum variable that keeps cannon state like: ready, reloading, firing. then change that state and allow/dissalow firing , play sounds and animations.

Multiple cannons is easy, add multiple player pawns with multiple controllers, create cannons as separate actors.

For smoke cannon balls etc. Best get some FX artist. Yes it is all easily programable, but if you are not artist doing FX just right is hard.

That mechanism in room, google for rapsberry pi or arduino plugins for unreal like “Arduino serial communication”

For sounds watch metasound tutorials, imo this sysstem is best for your project.

Storm: for this you rather need FX artist.