Unreal Dev Meeting - Valenciennes, North of France

Hello everyone,

You may have heard that some Unreal Dev meetings are born around the world. And we are one of these first group.

I’ll recap what’s an Unreal Dev Meeting: So, once a month we meet up to share about Unreal Engine 4. It’s as simple as that! These meetings can take any form as casual meet-ups, hangouts, workshops, presentations etc. The goal is to connect people with others and talk about UE4 to make awesome games. All of that in association with Epic Games. It’s a moment where we can exchange, present and help each others on our projects.

So, I’m leading a group that we are hosting on the Supinfogame’ campus (French school dedicated to video game carrers). We’ve already made two of these meetings (in November and in December) that lasted around two hours each.

I’m gonna recap what happened during these last two meetings, and then, this thread will be used to share and promote the projects that we talked about every month and our people are doing with UE4!

I’ll recap quickly what happenned in November:

  • I presented the objectives of our meetings and our means;
  • Some guys (Here and Here) presented their early prototype called Drift. It’s a VR space exploration game in which you navigate through a 60’s 70’s destroyed military space station. They play with gravity in and out of the station. And the player is guided by an AI. So, they showed their prototype and how they manage the Occulus Rift;
  • Then I explained a level design process for optimization and quick building based on some map produced during the Mapcore’s Whitebox Challenge on Unreal Tournament. So we walked through some maps to see how they were build and analyze the process;
  • Then, Elouan presented his 2d platformer. He showed some stuff as how he made the aiming turrets in blueprint, his boss fight (in blueprint) and how he built his level;
  • Finally, a team showed a game called Sneaking Bad that is still in pre-production. It’s a multiplayer infiltration game in which two teams of scientists try to reach a point while using chemistry to slow their enemy and distract the guards (no gun fight). And these guys talked about lots of things: Behavior tree for the AI, how they manage the online part, how they work both with blueprints and C++, they showed their test map with the interactive stuff and what their are doing to find the good lighting atmosphere…

what happenned in December:

  • People who went to the Montréal International Game Summit gave us some feedback and explained what was the UE dev tour etc.
  • Then the guys from Drift and Sneaking Bad came back and went more deeply into level streaming, UMG, Material instance and in some of their BP ((how they create a depressurization airlock for example).

Here’s a video of an environnement preview for Drift.

I’ll invite all the participants of our meetings to share their content here so they can get some feedback, promote their work and talk about it with more details.

And of course, I’ll share news about the upcoming events!

Cheers

is this just for students or can anyone turn up?

The Drift preview is really cool. There’s a pretty good movie called “Space Station 76” with Liv Tyler where the special effects are done in a similar retro style if anyone is interested. -Wasn’t sure if there was a connection or coincidence.

Nope tegleg, this is for everyone, using or wiling to learn UE4!

Thx, I’ll give them the reference :wink: