(Q4 2023)

Project was developed over the course of 3 months, and served as my primary introduction to game design in Unreal.

The project was completed for a semester long team project for my college Level Design class however, due to unforeseen circumstances, I was responsible for the full development of this project on my own.

Some of the key features that I had to learn while developing this project were:

• Swimming & Water Physics

• Cel-shading & Post Process Transitioning

• Fracturing

• Landscaping (Particularly for Caves)

• Jiggle Physics

• A.I. Behaviors & Combat Systems

Story

An island of tropical creatures are being invaded by a robot army led by an unknown villain. Using a magic staff given by the village elder, the hero must track down this evil doer and save his people from the robot menace.

Environment

The level I was tasked with making was an underwater cave, I decided to start by researching different DnD combat maps; specifically ones that related to cave systems. From this I brought my finished design into UE5 and used it as a guide. To make the cave walls, I used a landscape but had the level be inside/under it rather than on top of it.

Swimming

The swimming system was probably the most difficult part of the project to understand. Initially I was looking into much more complex systems utilizing multiple plugins that ended up not working for me at all. The way the water works is with several overlapping volume cubes, however when the player would cross into a new cube they would suddenly stop swimming and fall to the ground. After trying for awhile to fix this issue I decided it would be best to start over and find a new solution. In doing so I learned how to just use a physics volume to make a pretty decent swimming system in a matter of minutes. So the lesson learned there was to not aim for complex mechanics when you don't understand the basics of them yet.