Hello, Polycount!
As many of you probably have felt as well - sometimes making a game is more fun than playing one. That is why me and my friend,
Oskar Selin, is working on a side project when the mood strikes. Since we are both artists (I'm an animator and Oskar is the 3d artist) we both have to learn and make the blueprinting as we go.
It is a Dungeon Crawl-ish (we think) game, where the core will be Gear/Loot (Character Customization - most likely not stat-based gear, more like cosmetics and perk-based), Co-op and a fun combat in the Souls-like style. So far we've been working on this for maybe a month on our spare time (on those days when we get the feel for it).
I got inspired by Wavewarrior's thread
"A Delver's Fate" (which happens to be a quite similar game) to make a similar blog-style thread to keep the progress stored somwhere.
Our overall plan with this game is to make whatever we feel like, in a tempo we feel like. What we know we want currently is some kind of Hub where you can show off your gear, find a party and choose dungeon. We want to make the good loot kind of hard to get, we got some ideas as to how we'll achieve this - but we want the feeling that if you see someone with a cool looking weapon/cloak/whatever you'll know that that player is really good (kind of like when WoW actually had rare items). And some way later plans is to have a surprisingly weird and Invoker-esque spells-system, but that's way into the future.
I wanted to do a system of 100% based root motion animation, but as the friendly tooltip in Unreal says, Root motion from Everything is "not suitable for network multiplayer setups." So we had to go for a 50/50 compromise with root motion on special moves and old-school capsule movement on the normal stuff (run walk etc).
So where are we now?We got the network working fine, still got some minor glitches here and there, but it is as expected.
You can run and walk around with and without weapons. And when you're holding the block-button down it goes into shieldstance and alters speed.
We got two different attacks, one combo-attack with 3 hits and one charge-leap-ish attack (don't mind the Vfx). The combo is quite standard, click once and only one attack will go off, time it right and you'll chain it up with the next, and again with a third.
We have a system set up for different gear, however since we still don't have any HUD to swap gear we made a temporary Triggerbox-Wardrobe in the world. Most of the items will be animated... when I get the time:)
And finally we have a LockOn system. When locked on the camera will focus on the locked target and the player will strafe around it. Still needs to be polished up some - and needs strafe-animations.
So this is were we are now. Many of the animations will need to be polished and tweaked, and there is still tons of animations missing. The Level Art is only quick stuff Oskar made so we can have something else than the gray ground - it will change. The first enemy mesh is done, and will be animated soon-ish. We have an AI that works locally, so we need to fix him to work on the network. Next up is more art, a jump animation + combat roll-animations.
We'll try to keep this thread updated when we get new stuff in.
Feedback and Critique is always welcome:)
Thanks for reading!
Replies
What kind of an art style are you going for?
THIS NEED MORE MICRO TRANSACTIONS DAMMIT
Question: are you only using blueprints for this, or are you having to learn a significant bit of coding for this?
@PMILLER001
We are only using blueprint for this. Like Morris said none of us know scripting from before so we have to learn as we go. Unreal's blueprint system is so easy to use and there is so much support and tutorials available out there. That's really what made this project possible at all.
@GRATEFULBRED
Thank you for offering your help! Right now we don't need an extra hand but if we do in the future, when the project is more solid, I will let you know.
Here are a couple of images of the character in the first and second pass:
And a first draft on an enemy:
Thanks for reading!
/Oskar
Here are a couple of sketches I used to design the character
First character draft:
Second character draft (trying to figure out the geometry):
Bonus image relaxing in the pool:
@C86G - One step at a time, mate:) We'd love to make a full game out of it, but it's a bit early to say how it will go (pros and cons with doing it solely for fun)... + we got so many crazy ideas that we want to make that it will probably take a while to get there. Maybe we can share a playable build later on when we got some more gameplay