"Deaths Door" has proven to be a great learning curve in learning a new game engine, Unreal Engine, and creating a project with aspects of polish. Although I didn't necessarily reach all the goals I wanted when I initially planned this project, I believe that I was able to get close to reaching the desired outcome, being able to pick and change aspects that I didn't realize at the time were far too big. At the time of planning, I had planned to add complex enemies first and then work back based on difficulty and importance of each game feature. What I now realize is that each feature holds equal importance into creating an enjoyable game and thus each feature should have had equal attention spent on it.
The desired outcome for this project was dramatically altered over the development cycle due to the fact that my initial concept focused on enemies being the main draw to the game . I realized half-way through development that it wouldn't be enough of a draw in and hence, I added a bunch of different features to make it more challenging, while adhering to the time constraint, meaning that I had to make easy-to-implement yet meaningful components for the game.
Alternative ammo types were added for the guns, allowing for players to use silenced bullets, bullets that the enemy chases, bullets that build up damage over time, all the bullets from a magazine bursting, more powerful bullets). Players can also obtain power-ups that last 30 seconds. These power-ups are a x2 damage boost to bullets, x2 speed boost for the players movement, Invulnerability, damage reflect that reflects damage dealt by enemies back onto themselves and 50% armor / health refills. A points system was also added, in which points are rewarded based on whether on whether it killed or just damaged the enemy, and whether they were using a standard or alternative bullet. Enemies took a long time for me to integrate, so my initial idea was culled down so that more simplistic enemies were created so I could add more content to the game easily, while still making game play challenging. Below are a few examples of blueprints which i created.
The features described allowed me to create a framework for a bigger game and show off my ability to learn the fundamentals of Unreal, being blueprints, blend spaces, montages, behavior trees (Decorators, services and tasks), blackboards, lighting, world building and creating decals / material. This outcome helps position me better in the industry since it proves I can learn new concepts in a short amount of time. As mentioned in this article, it proves to be popular within the top AAA gaming industries, but also frustratingly difficult due to the lack of support from documentation, which shows that I am willing to push past the difficulty of working with an unfamiliar engine. It also offers negotiations for lower royalties, as mentioned here, which would allow me to profit more as a solo developer, which I aim to become. The revenue split, as depicted in this article, is actually quite fair for developers that publish to Epic Games, and since Epic games has tons of support for Unreal Engine, with tons of useful assets to use, making it reasonable to use this engine. If I have to enter the industry, there are numerous job opportunities available, an example of which is here.
Comments