Ongoing C++ Gameplay Example Series: Making a Survival Game

Hi guys!

Some of you may know me from my earlier work or these forums. Starting today, I am part of the Epic Games family as Engine Content Creator! I will be creating a small **third-person survival game series in C++ **as my first community project. are the details:

The series will be split up in 6 sections, released individually every 2 weeks. You can follow along with the source code through a public repository on Github.

You’ll learn about the game framework, how to deal with physics, materials, ray-casting, casting, replication, and many more concepts that have been covered in Blueprint countless times, but this time it will all be done in C++! Blueprint is still part of the series however! You will learn how to combine C++ and BP in your project and how to expose your code to be extended by Blueprint.

The game will be a third-person survival game focusing on familiar mechanics from games in this genre. This includes weapons, hunger/thirst and movable traps / barriers to build your defences. The series will cover networking, so at the end of the series you and a friend can hop on the game together and hunt down some zombies! More details on the project will come with each released section!

Each section will be announced on the forums through a new thread, you are free to ask questions every time a new section is released.

  • are the links to each section

Section 1 - This section sets up the third person character movement with animation, object interaction, simple hunger system, all with networking support.
Section 2

  • Adds weapon support for the character, a flashlight, UT-style inventory with on-character visual representation of the carried items and deals with damage, death and respawns for players.
    Section 3
  • Introduces AI with PawnSensing and Behavior Trees.
    Section 4
  • Introduces a gameloop with enemies, items, scoring and a time of day.
    Section 5
  • Discusses a few practical examples on networking the game. Adds support to move around objects in the world
    Section 6
  • In the sixth and for now final section of the series we’ll apply a coat of polish to the game, including improved AI behavior, zombie sound FX and bug fixes.

If you have questions and/or feedback, let me know in this thread! Hope you guys are as excited about this series as I am!

3 Likes

and Congrats for being part of Engine Content Creator!! :smiley: :smiley:

First of all congrats! I can hardly imagine how it has to be for you right now :smiley:

I do have a small question about this format. Every two weeks but this is supposed to be a video tutorial type of series right? Because that would certainly be and quite a bit more interesting that the current sample games. No doubt those are cool as well but to really follow something like this step by step is a great way to help people who have the basics down but need some kinds of guide on how to approach a project.
With this in mind I would like to see this started with some kind of “goals” or todos… basically the game design document. What is the gameplay supposed to be and which parts are important? So people are able to follow everything. Not just the step by step decisions but also the abstract mechanics which are supposed to be implemented and how you get from those to finished mechanics.

To finish my quick statement. It sounds like a great step forward to get people to understand UEs structure and the follow along sounds great! I thought exactly the same about the recent temple run game series on youtube. That was just great!

Hello ,

Congrats ! Very cool project but the series can be followed by c ++ beginner ?

Thank

This is very interesting. I will surely follow this, as I’m very much interested in learning C++ with Unreal Engine.

Congrats ! waiting forward for this

Will definitly keep an Eye on this one! C++ knowledge always welcome. And Congrats :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Wow, congratulations ! Looking forward to the tutorials, will be great to see some new C++ examples! :slight_smile:

This is ! Congrats. I will certainly be following this :smiley:

! Everything you do in Unreal seems so clean and correct. Very excited for this.

That’s , But please, check the API correctly, Last C++ tutorial I suffered bec. of the Build version difference

Love you all :smiley: <3

Congratulations ! It’ll be very interesting C++ journey. Can’t wait and I hope there will be video tutorials. I will follow for sure.

That is definitely the intention. It’s not going to be a step-by-step, but I’ll try to make the code as straight forward as possible, adding comments to explain the concepts and documentation will be available to further explain the reasoning behind certain coding concepts etc.

Right! This is definitely something that requires maintenance! The C++ API has been changing with each version, my own C++ tutorial requires an update with I hope to resolve very soon! Thanks for letting me know.

Congrats! This is amazing news for newbies in ue4 api like me :slight_smile: Thx for covering this. It is much appreciated!

Hell yeah! Cannot wait for this :slight_smile:

, I have a feeling this will be a great resource especially with the talent behind it! =)

Following!

Yeah! ! I’m really happy for you :wink:

Congrats man you deserve it with all what you are doing at such a high quality!

Thanks guys! I’ll do my best to make this something Epic! :slight_smile: