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.