Dog Fighter Development 1

So I unfortunately had to set 50 Ton Sword aside for a while, as it turned out that the vast majority of that project required a lot of non-humanoid animations which is, at the moment, well beyond my knowledge and would in my opinion be better to learn from my instructors this year than to try and wade through myself.

In the mean time though, I started making something else that was more feasible, Dog Fighter.







So it started off as an idea to make essentially First-Person Asteroids, which went along pretty well. The ship controls very closely to the one in Asteroids, with lots of heavy drifting, very difficult turning, and terrible brakes. Basically, just like in the game, you have to be aware of what you are doing and how fast you are going in order to maneuver effectively.








After getting the ship to work, I felt like just shooting floating rocks would be pretty boring, considering the whole point of a first person perspective is to put you directly into the action so there should be at the very least some stuff to look at. So I built a dystopian metropolis.







I also made it rain







So while I was working on rain I came up with this idea for the player to sort of get introduced to the setting by walking to a parking garage from your messy apartment, which meant I would have to make an apartment and a parking garage and while in retrospect that may have been a bad idea it did lead to further ideas on the gameplay.



I then had a friend do some voices for me and by this point it turned into an adventure game (as things inevitably do when I make them). Think of Walker Texas Ranger but on Venus. I am still juggling around plot so it's all still very vague but trees are involved.







Since it's a space cowboy story there's gotta be some quick-shooting! The main character is a cop and has taken a personal oath to never kill, so he disarms his opponents with fancy shooting. This character is BAD-I, who is basically a tutorial baddie for when I work out how the shooting system works. I want it to be a minigame sort of thing but I loathe quicktime button press nonsense so I need to work out a good, non-repetitive system.



And here is the parking garage atm, which is getting pretty close to being done so I can go back to working on the flying parts.

So anyway, that's what I've been doing the past few weeks. I'll try to keep this updated as I go (for real this time haha) since there haven't been any roadblocks nearly as massive as with 50TS. Obviously character animations will need to wait until I learn how but the base game is definitely feasible so far.

If you have questions about this or Unreal in general feel free to ask away, this is primarily a learning exercise for me so explaining stuff helps me to understand it better as well as you.