Hello all, so I am currently a student undertaking a diploma of interactive and digital games which in short is basically game design and development. For some time even before I have been doing this course I started learning UE4 and decided a good way to learn was to develop small projects and remakes of games I like so I can learn a variety of skills in relation to the engine and game development.
This project is my attempt at recreating certain sections of my personal all time favorite game ‘Super Metroid’ in a newer style, namely Metroid Primes style, this way I can still make a lot of creative decisions as one would expect going from a 2D platformer to a First Person Adventure format. The first few areas I intend to make is all based around the mini-boss Spore Spawn.
The rooms I intend to make surrounding the boss room.
I intend to make the mini-boss into a fully fledged boss with a wider variety of moves that it can use against Samus, this is simply because its current fight would translate badly into 3D and would be a rather boring fight. Below you can see my first attempts at getting things working, originally the arm cannon was just a quick model I made, It is beyond terrible I know. The Spore Spawn did move around though and had some minor attacks and could be killed, but I wasn’t happy, so I did try to learn some more and decided to really focus on one thing at a time, so I though it would be best to focus on Samus getting all of her abilities in the game and get her feeling solid before working on enemies and bosses.
The first order of business with Samus was her Arm Cannon, which is obviously quite important as it is almost always on screen and in use in some way.
As you can see above the new arm cannon is a huge improvement over the first pass, although I am quite happy with it I still have a lot of work to do on it before it really looks great. At the same time I was modelling the Arm Cannon I also did some models of a Missile and a Super Missile.
After I got those second pass models in the game I decided to work on the HUD.
In that last image I mucked around in Photoshop to see what sorta HUD layout I wanted, that is the outcome of said mucking around.
In the .webm link below, I show that certain surfaces can reflect beam shots, and if they hit Samus, they will cause damage, I will adjust certain enemies and how they attack to incorporate this change, so players will have to be careful as careless shots can end up causing massive damage. In saying that, reflected shots can be shot mid-flight if the player is quick and accurate enough.
http://webmshare.com/ZNV10
In this .webm I show a heavily WIP version of the Speed Booster, which gets the player moving from the standard speed of 700 to 3000, using the character movement –> set max walk speed. you can also see I increase the Field of View slightly but it does have some undesirable effects which I will need to rework.
http://webmshare.com/W5jav
In this .webm I show the Chargebeam working and basically fully implemented, obviously I still have visuals to work on but the core functionality is there.
http://webmshare.com/6MOoE
The following .webm shows that I have gotten Morphball working as well as a small little Morphball challenge typically found in the Metroid Prime games more than the traditional Metroid games.
http://webmshare.com/DG9rK
Here is a couple of images of the challenge and the Morphball
Sorry for the ultra long post filled with images, I would like to know what you all think though, I frequently browse the forums but thought I’d wait a bit until I got some solid progress before posting this, I am still learning a load about UE4 but I still occasionally ask for help on the forums.
EDIT 1-2-15:
So a small update, I have unfortunately been slacking off playing a lot of Dying Light and not working on this, so today I decided to try and get the Morphball Bombs in and working… They are working to an extent but I’m still having issues with using a radial force, I might post about it in the blueprint help or something though.
Either way here is a .webm showing the bombs off, again the visuals aren’t a priority just the base functionality is.
