Shooting, Shooting, and More Shooting
POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 26,
2024
BY ABNER SALAZAR
So it turns out that getting some satisfying shooting takes time! I am having so much fun working in Unreal Engine 5, it makes development both easy and challenging at times, but I enjoy tackling a challenge head on. I had to look up a lot to get shooting up and running on my game. I knew from my development in Unity that I wanted to trace some rays in order to find targets to lock on to, and for my projectiles which would be hit scan projectiles. Turns out that in Unreal it is just called “Traces”.
During this development block I also took the time to figure out how I would make auto locking work, and I think I got it to a really good place! The system I set for it is pretty scalable so I can make it lock as far, or near as I want, and with greater or less precision. I’m really happy with that turned out.
POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 25,
2024
BY ABNER SALAZAR
USING UE5
The Web!
I like to think of myself as a well organized person, so it was a bit challenging when I had to connect all of these nodes, to make sure that they were all in places where if someone else came through and tried to piece together the puzzle of what is happening they would be able too without too much effort.
I tried to fit in as much as I could into this screenshot, but there is a lot of content to go through.
The Challenge
The main challenge I had while developing this was, learning how I could get a lot of the little details to work just right. I wanted there to be a camera offset, as well as the player character to animate well, while also making sure that the shooting felt good for the player. This took some iterations and as you can see from the web of nodes. This was a lot of work, but I definitely feel way more confident now with the engine than I did before, so in the future I will have a lot easier time with development.
The Fun Stuff!
On the bright side, I decided to add a bullet time effect when the player is in the air and aiming down sights! I think this will help a lot when the player is moving really fast and has to make those quick decisions! With this I also came up with a list of things I might want to change such as: making it where the player can toggle sprint instead of right now it is only walk to jog, I also want to further tweak some of the animations to make them look better, and start working on a checkpoint system (the doors in the video). This should all be ready by the proof of concept that I will have on my next post, see you guys next time!