A very simple Android game that originated from a tutorial. It’s a single tap, top-down endless runner. You tap the penguin to change it’s direction, and the rest just happens automatically, with the game speed incresing over time. You need to keep the penguin in the screen.
Everything was made using Blueprints only.
Right now all the gameplay mechanics are in place. What’s missing is sounds (already being made) and Google Play integration.
I do not use HDR mobile rendering or any lights at all. Everything is fully rough and unlit using 3 image textures in total (+GUI images). So far I get consistent 60FPS on Sony Xperia M (Adreno 305) which makes me quite happy about the performance.
The main task right now is to find the right balance between the speeds of the camera and the penguin. I will also need to fine tune the camera aspect ratio once the adds will come onto the screen. And the animations will need some more love as well, as this is only the first iteration. I am also not quite happy yet with the geometry of the background.
The package size (ETC1) is around 73MB, 20MB for the .apk and 53MB for the .obb, no tricks used at this stage to decrease the build size, just a simple cleanup and reasonable asstes quality. I really hope that 4.8 will bring some serious improvements in this area.
If anyone would like to test it out on his phone or tablet that would be great, PM me and I will send you the link. If anyone is willing to test it on some high-end Android device I can package a version with anti-aliasing and maybe some other post process effects to see how it runs.
Hi
this seems to be a cool one
I’m a starter of UE4 and I’ve been watching some series of UE4 tutorials on youtube.
up to now I’ve not found yet a complete tutorial for mobile game developing.
please guide me with this issue if you can.
I am glad to hear that as that was exactly my goal
Well if you are hoping for something really complete and for mobile, than I am affraid that I don’t know that kind of tutorial.
The game that I am making is based on an endless mechanic tutorial from udemy.com, however it was not designed for mobile. Even changing the screen orientation to portrait required some modification both in the assets construction and in some blueprint mechanics. Materials also required an entirely different approach. I did of course other changes as well, from the most obvious ones like all the graphics and the overall game theme to gameplay based ones like scoring rules, game speed and overall game balance.
The tutorial you will find on udemy.com will also lack any serious guidance on animations preparation and set-up, as these come ready with the tutorial starting materials. It also does not cover UMG, so this you will have to figure it out by yourself based on the Epic’s official series.
The truth is also that I have been playing with game design and game development for some time now, using Unity before UE4, I do also have quite a lot of experience in 3D, so anything from simple 3D low poly models, thru texturing to skeletal animations was nothing new to me. This makes it a bit hard for me to tell “where to start”.
I suggest you make a list of all the areas you feel like you need to learn. And than start searching for the tutorials, always having your own game design in mind. Everytime doing a tutorial take a moment and think how will you need to adapt these techniques for your ideas.
try out the udemy.com tutorial - this will learn you some overall logic of a simple UE4 game, you will get comfortable with Player Character Controler, with the Game Mode, etc…
watch the official UE4 tutorials about setting up animations, it does say everything you need to know to get started, the level creation tutorial is also a must, and the blueprint introductory series
I have no idea how are your 3D skills, but you do need models, you do need them with proper UV layouts, you need to texture them, you need to rig them and animate them, I use Blender and I can recommend the blendercookie tutorials for sure
and to work with Blueprints comfortably it is really good to have some basic understanding of coding in any language, it’s just about the way of thinking, again I have no idea how are your skills in this area, if the concept of coding anything at all is all new to you maybe try at least watching this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA68C1F33757B4A38 (up to the episode 16), this should give you some basic understanding what these fancy nodes are hiding from you,
However this is only my personal experience and I did some Visual Basic coding yeeeears ago, I did some ActionScript, I do work with advanced HTML/php templates, but not as a php coder, my job is not to break it so coding is not a new concept for me, C++ and Blueprints are
But you simply will have to search for knowledge in many different places and than figure out by yourself how to join the pieces together. And in some areas you just have to experiment, like the unlit materials for example.
A little tip for the animations, it kinda gives the feeling like he’s going backwards, tilt the body a little bit to move the center of the gravity forward.
Thanks for the tip, I guess that this going backwards impression has also sth to do with the feet, as his steps are really small and not that recognizable.
Just a small update on the build size. I did some clean up with my textures to make sure none of them are having unnecessary Alpha channels, I did scale them down and I turned off MipMaps for all of them, as I do have a fixed distance from the camera for all my objects.
The .obb is down to 40MB (from 53MB) and the .apk still at 20MB. But what’s interesting is that after pushing it to the phone it still shows 103MB like it did before. To make sure there will be no leftovers I did clean all of the old files before pushing the new version to the phone, but it didn’t change anything.
Thanks for the hint with the alpha channel and mipmaps, this reduced the size of my Android project a bit. Unfortunately I can’t help you with your issue as I do not experience this.
PS: I could test your game on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 P5100, running Android 4.2.2 if you want
A small update on the app size. There is some good and some bad news for anyone interested in the android build size.
With the Shipping/for Distribution configration, with everything packed into a single .apk file the size is: 42MB for ETC1 (this includes some new audio samples). I did delete the Engine/Content/Slate/Fonts folder to go down with the build size.
That was good news, the bad news is that after installing the app on the phone it shows 105MB.
But there is one more good news, it is being investigated by Epic.
The Penguin has passed the compability test for 2 out of 4 Amazon devices. The Fire Phone and Fire 8.9HDX tablet reported full compability which comes as no surprise regarding the specs.
However as Google API services are not compatible with the Amazon’s Fire OS the AdMob won’t work. This, at the moment, leaves no options for in-game monetization…
