Project Wizard

Intro:

This project is made in Unreal Engine 4 and it's made with the Oculus Rift in mind.
It's about two players duelling in the ruins of a castle in the middle of a lake or ocean with fireballs.
The project was made (most of it anyway) over a two week period and I got help from a few fellow students with some of the assets and some programming. Adam Oresten, Jesper Karlsson and Rian Drake helped me during those two weeks, more info in the credits at the bottom.

I have showed the project of at Digital Nationz in the MDS section of the event. People who played it though it was really cool and was impressed that it was made over two weeks. I got a lot of good feedback on things I could have added and fixed but my limited knowledge of the engine and coding hindered progress.

Decisions made during production:

I started working on the project two weeks before Digital Nationz with the intent to finish it in time for DNz. I worked with the new Unreal Engine 4 which I had used a little bit before but I knew it supported the Oculus Rift and was easy to use. I did not know about the UI issues I would encounter though.

There wasn't that much of a decision process when I worked on the map, it was mostly just doing as much as I could before Digital Nationz. I prioritized things that would benefit the project for when I showed the game of at Digital Nationz such as easy keybindings and that people had to be able to pick it up and play right away. I therefore didn't do any real menus as the people who would play it at Digital Nationz wouldn't need to be able to close the game through a menu.

This is the moodboard for the setting that I wanted to have. I began concepting and the map below is the one I chose to continue with.

This is how the final map looks, pretty close to the original but whats the castle courtyard is differnet from what I had planned. I had the idea that I could make a pretty simple map and then focus more on the gameplay for the project but as it turns out coding is pretty hard and the gameplay became pretty simple.

Lessons learned during production:

I learnt a lot about Unreal Engine 4 during production but also a good way to make foliage that I used for the project. I underestimated how hard it would be to create gameplay elements with the blueprint system in Unreal Engine 4.

Working with the Oculus was really fun and the DK2 is much easier to use than the DK1 which was great. I've learned that making a UI without knowing what you're doing is really hard, especially since the UMG didn't work with the Oculus in the version of the engine I had to work with IE: 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5.

Credits:

Adam Oresten - Character + animations and AOE indicator

Jesper Karlsson - Fire Particles and brazier + barrel
Rian Drake - Helped a lot with coding, especially multiplayer related things.

Made in Unreal Engine 4
I used some of the default assets that are available such as the ground textures, water and rocks.