I started using Unreal Engine about two months ago in order to diversify my skillset as a game developer, and I just wanted to show what I’ve come up with so far. The game is called Untitled, a Day in the Life of a Lowly Paid Security Guard, and plays like a simple flight sim game where your job is to shoot space rocks.
The gameplay is basically just Asteroids in 3D, but I chose to make this game simple for two reasons: I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew on my very first foray into Unreal Engine, and I wanted to be able to focus on things like presentation and design instead of sinking a lot of time learning how to program state-based AI (which I will definitely want to do in the future).
Using Unreal Engine was actually pretty refreshing as someone who has only used Unity in the past. I was surprised at how quickly I could create a working prototype of actual gameplay from scratch. It definitely helped that I knew in a general sense what types of solutions to search for from my prior experience with Unity, like how to do something similar to Unity’s OnTrigger events which turned out to be Event Actor Overlap, etc.
There were a couple of takeaways and things that I learned about Unreal Engine specifically that I would like to share just in case someone reading this is also trying to get into Unreal development and would like to save themselves a couple of headaches:
- If you import your own models into Unreal, learn how to unwrap UV’s. If you build your game or lighting, you’ll probably get an overlapping UV error and your model will look really stupid. Luckily, Unreal Engine can automatically build correct UV maps when you import your model. You still have to manually set the UV map to the newly generated one by going into your model’s static mesh editor and setting its Light Map Coordinate Index to 1 - 1 being the one that UE generated and 0 being the original that you brought in from Maya/Blender/etc.
- Trying to get UI widgets to display values passed from a variable was a nightmare at fight, but I found a janky workaround. The Event Graph in UI Widgets can directly retrieve variables and values from the Player Pawn, so I pass the health of the ship I am escorting to the Player Pawn as part of an Event Tick and then I use an Event Tick node in the UI widget itself to print the value grabbed from the Player Pawn. There’s probably a more efficient way to do this that doesn’t require code to run on every update, but it works for now given the low complexity of my game. I’ll definitely look into using better methods in the future though.
- Getting used to casting in blueprints definitely had a big learning curve associated with it. The first issue of casting that I ran into involved trying to use trigger volumes in order to make gameplay events occur, which resulted in really messy looking blueprints. After experimentation and online research, I learned that you could set a variable in a blueprint and make its type ‘Object Types/Actor’ (making sure to check the Editable box). This exposes it to the Details panel and lets you pass in a reference to an Actor in your level, which works a lot like the way you would expect it to in Unity with GameObjects by passing stuff to it through the Inspector. This made my resulting blueprints look much cleaner and more efficient.
- If you have dialogue in your game, you should use Unreal Engine’s built-in concurrency system to make sure that they don’t play over each other.
There were a bunch more things that I picked up from working on this game, but those were the ones that I could think of from the top of my head. Anyway, that’s all I have for now and it’s time for some sleep. Good night.
izzy806
2087
areudirty
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
gamechangershow