Arcade Game: Get Rich or Die

For our final project in programming, we were split into groups to recreate arcade games in UE4 with Blueprint. Me and my classmate Zaq chose to do Smash TV, a room-to-room horde shooter. We chose not to completely mimic the game, going for a slightly different spin on the same general concept both for better PC controls and less work-intensive assets (we needed to do this in 2 weeks).

The end result, in my biased opinion, is pretty fun! This was easily the best assignment this year, and definitely the most useful one in terms of putting all of the things I learned to use in one project, a game that I built from the ground up from scratch.

Concept Work: Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry

Recently I've been drawing a lot of knights, since 1) I like knights and 2) 10KT has knights in it. When the knights are all Norman, I think it's kind of tempting as with a lot of medieval settings to make them into stormtroopers that are all identical with no real identities or distinguishing features. However, since this is supposed to be an adventure game, the knights are a whole lot more than just cannon fodder for some boring hack-n-slash, they're characters



I tried to achieve a certain level of uniformity but still make the knights distinguishable from one another. In the case of an adventre game, you will often be going back and forth between numerous locales, and it's important not only for the environments to be separable but also the people within those environments.

Racing Game Attract Trailer

50 Ton Sword: Development 1

So I'm building a game over the summer (and ongoing as time allows for it), primarily for game design portfolio purposes and also to get a good grasp on UE4/Blueprint and any other areas that happen to arise. It is absolutely 100% for professional purposes and there is no relation to my obsessive love for robots.

It'll probably be in the ugly flat colors and simple models stage for a while, since right now I am working on the systems/weapons/etc. which don't exactly lend themselves to being very pretty to look at, but from a functional standpoint I think it's kind of neat. That may of course be personal bias related to navigating the Blueprint spaghetti soup for too long.

So let's bring everyone up to speed:


These are the Lances: Hunchback, Petard, Zeus, Pummel, Buzzard. Lances are highly personalized, sophisticated war machines, which can only be afforded by wealthy Barons and Dukes, who consider their Lances to be their most prized possessions. Most of them are pretty apparent functionally except for the Pummel, which has massive 'fists' instead of the standard arm-gun setup.


In Maya measurements, they are actually only about 5-6 feet tall, although a person stands only a little higher than their feet at roughly 5 inches. The dropship on the other hand is pretty massive, it's basically a flying garage.

50 Ton Sword is kinda like a MechWarrior Lite. While there probably won't be custom loadouts/armor building as that's kinda outside of my expertise at the moment, it's got a very fighter jet-esque control scheme similar to MW, and the different lances will offer varying loadouts for all manner of property damage. This is mostly the Pummel's fault, because it has some very large and unique weapon functions planned that would make a loadout system... more difficult than usual.




Right now I have the movement and weapons systems implemented, along with most of the HUD. Movement is fairly simple, kinda like flying a plane, your forward/backward speed is constant movement based on the throttle, while you 'manually' turn, and firing is a matter of arming the desired weapons and firing. There is also of course a Fire All button to noobspam things close to you.




There are also jump thrusters and a spotlight, because duh. For some reason it has not occurred to me to add an indicator for the lights until just this moment, so that's probably going in there. Also toggling viewports. I am debating swapping out the rear-view camera (which I am finding surprisingly difficult to work out) for just a third camera option but there may be some confusion as a result of that kind of thing.

So yeah, right now I'm working on making the actual weapon parts of the weapons, which is mostly a matter of figuring out projectiles and making them go in the right direction. I'll try to update fairly regularly, although it will depend on how interesting I think the part I'm working on is, haha.

Arcade Attract Trailer: Outrun 2

I never played much on arcade machines, so finding an arcade racing attract trailer was a bit tricky. After some digging through Youtube however, I found one called "Outrun 2", which I thought was pretty good.

The trailer is super fast paced, generally keeping the car in the center of our attention as much as possible. It also, instead of simply being a recording of a single race, shifts between numerous locales, showing off multiple levels and environments all at once, which would entice me much more to waste several quarters than any single level. The fast pacing also works well for the game, presenting it as a non-stop pedal to the metal thrill ride.

HUD Mockup: Winnebago Brave

As one of my biggest struggles with modeling the Winnebago in the first place was the complete lack of consistency in its builds, being essentially a long running series of plywood boxes stacked on top of old van chassis, I felt it would be acceptable to fudge a bit in the accuracy of the speedometer and tachometer layouts for my racing HUD.

Thus, I opted to go with some classic horizontal layouts, because nothing says a chunky square 1972 Winnebago like a nice, chunky square dashboard, with some faux wood paneling for good measure.

To complete the look, and match the aesthetic of my level, I added some patriotic banners for the timers, and some snazzy stickers to personalize. The result, I think, is a masterpiece of star spangled excellence worthy of my Winnebago.

Fort Mexizona - Alpha

Here is a video demo I recorded of my Fort Mexizona Alpha test! Winnebagogo baby.

Custom Particle First Pass

For my race level, to give it that extra patriotic touch, I thought I would add in a fighter jet flyover, with red white and blue trails.

While finding an example wasn't exactly difficult, I found it ironic that the most famous example of colored contrails like this is actually attributed to the French air force as part of a Bastille Day celebration.

As these jets and their contrails would be seen only briefly, I saw it fit to ignore the cloudy smoke effects for the moment and focus on the actual trails themselves, which I attained in Cascade through colored ribbons. As we had already gone through a number of Cascade tutorials previously in class, this was relatively simple to accomplish.

While I still need to adjust some things, particularly the rotation of the particles (which currently retain the facing they had on spawn, in other words meaning that as you approach them they continue to face your previous location)