Making a First Person Shooter in Unreal Engine - Part 4

So I have finished working on the tutorial for a simple first person shooter on Digital Tutors, here is what I have:

Last time I finished implementing the last few things that would actually end the game and just reload the same level. This time I had to implement the event graph for a secret path that lets the player shave a few seconds of their time in the game. The picture above shows the network that does a few different things: it checks to make sure you entered/exited the trigger sphere for the door and another that actually makes the doors slide down.

The picture above is of the final state of the game. The green stop watch is the bonus pick-up that reduces the player's final time by 3 seconds and you can also see the target. These two types of pick-ups are spreed around the level and the player has to shoot them to activate them. You can also see your current ammo on the bottom left corner and your current time on the top right corner.

The picture above is of the final screen that shows the stats for the player. This breaks down exactly how much "real" time they took, any time reductions if they got the timer pickups, and the final time. It also tracks how many targets the player hit and how many were destroyed. For this game I made it so each target could only be destroyed if it was hit 3 times, that is why it shows that I hit 1 target, but didn't destroy any of them.

I found that in Unreal you can create a destruction mesh out of an object and you can have a mesh shatter to pieces. I have tried to create one out of the target mesh, but I haven't been able to do it on my own since this part isn't in the tutorial. I will keep trying to do it on my own and will make a post if I figure it out. Thanks for reading!

Making a First Person Shooter in Unreal Engine - Part 3

I am now about 3/4 of the way done with the tutorial, and here is what I have so far:

Since last time, I created a way for the player to be able to finish the level. This consists of the player running through the map and "pushing" a button on the final room. For this end state, I have collision sphere around the button that displays a couple lines of text once the player is inside the sphere. If the player press the space bar as the instructions say, they will be unable to fire their gun or move.

Here is a closer look at how the network for firing the gun and moving around the map have been laid out. Please note that I have a few variables that I use to make sure that the player can't fire their weapon or can't move once the end game sequence has been started.

I hope that I can finish the tutorial soon, but since I have been staying late at work everyday I don't have much time to work on this. Thanks for reading!

Making a First Person Shooter in Unreal Engine - Part 2

So I am now a little more than halfway done with tutorial for making a FPS level in Unreal Engine. Here are a couple screenshots of what I think was the most valuable in the tutorial:

The screenshot about is the network I made for the flotation of targets that will be around the level. These targets have a static mesh and a particle system that make it look like they are floating thanks to a couple of rockets on the bottom of the target.

But since it would be weird to just have the target levitating perfectly still, we added this effect that moves the object ever so slightly up-and-down. Also, I added a delay with a random value to make sure that each target doesn't move at the exact same time.

Next was a brief introduction into Widget Blueprints, this is a builtin way for Unreal Engine to display a UI to your player. For now I have just set up the 4 different elements in the UI to keep track of the ammo the player has and the current time that the player has spent on the level. On the next few lessons I will learn how to do Data Bindings so the UI can update in real time.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Making a First Person Shooter in Unreal Engine - Part 1

So I have to say that I am completely in love with Unreal Engine and I can't stop going through tutorials to learn as much as I can about the engine. I recently finished a couple of tutorials that showed me how to use Blueprints and Data Tables in Unreal Engine.

I have decided that I am ready to learn more about the engine and learn how to make a First Person Shooter in Unreal, all thanks to Digital Tutors. I really like their site, they have helped me out a ton recently and I only wish that I would have taken advantage of it a couple of years ago.

Anyways, I have now started to the lesson and have started to make make some functions in Unreal, mainly this one:

When you start the lesson, the world is already set up for us so it gives us time to concentrate on only making the Blueprints for the game play to work the way we want it. This node network was created to help us actually shoot from the gun we already have set up. Essentially we get the location of the center of the screen and do a line trace to check if we hit anything along the line. I know that its kind of basic, but I just really like that we are able to do all this using Blueprints and not actual C++ code.

At this time I haven't gotten too far into the series, but I will keep working on this as much as possible over the next few days. I image that this series will take me at least a week to finish since there are 40 lessons total, so hopefully I can work through them fairly quickly. Thanks for reading!