FPS Drone Shooter

Project Summary

The project’s focus was to learn the principal elements of developing a first-person shooter in Unreal Engine 5. It focused on learning how to implement character movement, combat elements, enemy AI, environment design and managing game modes.

The project was aided by a tutorial purchased from GameDev. To gain the most out of the tutorial, I started by doing each step of the tutorial before watching how the problem was solved. This allowed me to find my own solution and then to learn their solution to many challenges.

Project Goals

  • Character Movement
    • Adding character controls and movement.
    • implementing animation blueprints.
    • Implementing animation state machines.
    • Added a flashlight to be used in darker areas.
  • The Drone (Enemy)
    • Implementing patrolling for the drones.
    • Implemented rotation and location blueprints for chasing the player character.
    • Added patrolling.
    • Created drone attack and death.
  • Combat
    • Implemented basic game functions such as:
      • Health
      • Ammo
    • Added automatic, burst and single fire options for the weapon.
  • Environment
    • Created a dark-night city-scape environment.
    • Added lighting to assets to create streetlights.
    • Added fire particles and detritus to elevate the mood of the environment.
  • Game Mode
    • Created states for each element of the player session.
    • Displayed a health bar that increases and decreases as required.
    • Displayed the player character’s current ammo.
    • Display the remaining drones in a level.

Obstacle Assault – Learning Unreal Engine Part 2

This is part two of the Unreal 5.0 C++ Developer: Learn C++ and Make Video Games tutorial on GameDev.

I made the obstacle course my own, using the created C++ blueprint to make moving and rotating obstacles. The entire course goes from the starting island to a secondary island where the goal is to reach the castle at the top.

Reaching the castle allows you to gain a “Win” and restart from the beginning. The simple goal I added on my own is to make it where the player is required to reach the end (castle), without falling from the islands as many consecutive times as possible. Falling from the islands causes the player to lose all win counts and to restart from zero.

Warehouse Wreckage – Learning Unreal Engine Part 1

This is part one of the Unreal 5.0 C++ Developer: Learn C++ and Make Video Games tutorial on GameDev.

For this course, I simply familiarized myself with blueprints, creating assets and using some minor logic to start the player with twenty cannon balls. Once the player runs out of ammo, the level reloads. This was all done in Blueprints to learn some of the basics of programming in a visual format.

Textures were added to the warehouse to make it more interesting, and ray tracing was used to simplify the process.