More Ether One WIP in UE4
Hey all,
Apologies on the lack of updates over the last month. As some of you may have heard, EGX in London is coming up. We’ve been (extremely) lucky enough to be selected by the Unreal Engine team to showcase Ether One at the event in the Unreal booth which is AMAZING news for us!
This meant that we had to get the demo polished up and pretty much close to final representation of the game. There are still a few small tweaks we need to do, mostly with lighting, but we’re in a pretty good place.
The great thing about pushing yourself to get a good chunk of the game to gold standard is that you get quite a few of the game mechanics implemented which you can then start implementing across the rest of the game. Some big things are in the game now are the pickup items, doors, drawers and projectors in the game. Along with the other interactable stuff which we’ve mentioned previously like valves, levers and radios.
We decided to create the pickup system entirely through C++. We had a pretty good prototype set up through Blueprint but as the complexity increased it started to get a little complicated keeping track of everything. Blueprints are still great for handling all the customisations of the pickups such as static meshes, distance from camera & height of pickup so it’s a great workflow. Here’s a quick video of the pickups working in game:
We also nearly have the entire game lit apart from a couple of the small set piece levels. We’re firing on all departments right now just trying to get all content into the game. After I set up all the levels with the correct meshes in place, James (artist) went in a lit all the levels and whilst we were doing that Dave (Programmer) was coding all the mechanics so that when the lighting was complete I was ready to go and place all the pickups, doors, draws & other interactables. Currently whilst we’re waiting on some of the more custom scripting for the game to be done, NJ (Audio) is putting in all the reverb volumes, ambient sounds & music in the game to get the levels to a good standard. We’re trying to work as efficiently as we can and I know I say this a lot but it’s crazy how quick the workflow is inside of UE4.
So this week we’re pretty much just polishing up the demo ready to take down to EGX. Once the expo is out of the way we’re going to work level by level polishing each in the same way starting at the beginning of the game. On the programming side we’ve decided to push a lot of focus in VR so we should have some fun updates for that in the next few weeks. Although a lot of people loved the Rift integration in the UDK version of Ether, it was implemented quite late on into development and we feel we can do an even better job this time around. So whilst everyone else is working on polishing the rest of the game, Dave will be putting a lot of focus into VR which should be really fun.
I think that’s all for now, we’ll be sure to update after EGX and if any of you are at the expo be sure to drop by and say hey!