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Personal project: Unreal custom Niagara spline interface

Unreal custom Niagara spline interface: The concept: Whoa boy the title is a bit of a word salad, but let me explain what I wanted more simply. Basically, I wanted to have a particle system follow a set track (in Unreal), speeding up and slowing down as it followed it. Luckily, splines exist. A spline is basically a list of ordered points in the world (with a bit of extra stuff defining scales, tangents and how they should be interpolated between) that produce a trail. And handily, Niagara (Unreal's particle system) has an (admittedly experimental) data interface for splines. This allows you to pass a spline into the particle system and use functions in the interface to create the particle system you want. I even found a tutorial on how to create the type of effect I wanted. So job done, right? Wrong. Very close, but no cheddar. The Niagara interface has functions allowing you to get the position along the spline by passing in how far along the spline you are. But this is based on...
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Hands: Monetisation and the Shop

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 One of my major tasks on Hands was the creation of a monetisation system and shop. This involved connecting to both the company backend and the Meta one, all the way through to hooking up the UI and widgets and the gameplay too. The finished shop The requirements: There were four different things we wanted to sell in the shop; three types of cosmetics (skins, trails and slap effects) and toys, which can be spawned in once they've been purchased. There also needed to be a screen for special offers (the top icon on the right). We also needed the player to be able to actually use the skins and items they purchased, so after some discussion I suggested to the UI artist that the shop also double as the inventory itself - owned items would have a button to equip them if they were selected. This made the UI simple from a visual perspective, as well as ensuring players would be able to see (and hopefully buy!) the other skins in the shop while they switched what they had equipped. This al...
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Frenzies

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  Frenzies Frenzies is a chaotic VR PvP shooter, with over 15000 unique players and a 4.7* rating before the sunsetting announcement.  Frenzies was made in Unreal, with C++ and a small amount of blueprint work. I worked on Frenzies from prototyping, to release, to live-service support. I covered most of the areas of the codebase during my time on it, but here are a few of the stand-outs I personally had ownership of: Networked movement, including handling changing speeds on slopes, adding a working dash mechanic and supporting ziplines and cover usage Creation of  a system to manage different round types , as well as ownership of many of the different round types themselves, such as Push, Red Light Green Light, Touchdown and Tug Of War, as well as contributing towards all of the remaining round types at various points. VR comfort features, such adding vignettes during movement, as well as implementing an automatic in-game body correction system Implementing an in-game HUD...
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Frenzies: Auto body correction

This was an interesting gameplay issue I encountered during my time at Near Light which tested my skills with 3D spacial maths, so I thought I'd discuss it here.   The issue So Frenzies, as a multiplayer shooter, needs clear targets for people to shoot. But as a VR game, the game also needs to respect (to some extent) the movement of your head. If you try to move your head forwards, and it doesn't move in VR, it feels really bad  (trust me on this), plus Meta doesn't let you put your game on their store. So player's HMD (head mounted display, where in game their head is) must have unconstrained movement, but also  we need to make sure their body must follow this. If we didn't have the body follow the head, players would move to a corner, then just take a step round it in the real world, leaving their body safely behind cover but letting them see round - not what we wanted. To give a bit more basis from a technical perspective, the issue here is that there are two po...
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Hands

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  Hands - an unreleased multiplayer movement sandbox So what exactly is it? The concept is a pretty simple (though unique) one - rather than having a whole humanoid body to run around the world like most VR games, you are a hand. The game uses the hand tracking functionality of the meta quest to use your hand's movement to control your hand in game (I feel like I might end up saying hand a lot in this post...). You can scuttle along the ground like a crab, slap the ground to jump and make gestures with your fingers to the other players. The game provided a playground with a number of toys available, such as trampolines and jetpacks, and was planned to release with a tag game mode (though another football game mode was also finished). The 30s teaser trailer below shows the tag game mode, the movement (both jumping and crawling), the playground and some of the various customizations. In my time with the game I worked on a number of the features, as well as general bug fixing and impr...
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Frenzies: Progression

 The background: Frenzies is an online multiplayer shooter, and one of the things we realised we needed to have was a progression system, to drive retention and give goals for the players to work towards. Near Light has a custom backend which was being developed at the time, so my task was to work with the backend engineer to support the client/gameplay server side, as well as to tie into the gameplay/UI. Here's a marketing TikTok about the feature: Key features of the progression system: Backend communication. The information about levels, xp and so on are passed to and from the backend using a JSON schema to define the messages. This schema needed to be implemented in C++ to handle the data so it can be converted to and from JSON. Conveniently, the Unreal FJsonObjectConverter class has functions for converting between JSON and UStructs, so what was required here was implementing the schema in the correct UStructs, simple enough. Slightly less simple was controlling when messages ...
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Frenzies: The Objective Actor

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   Frenzies: The Objective Actor The Background: So for the first post on Frenzies, I'm choosing one of the first major systems I created as part of Frenzies, which has held up the gameplay since. So what is it? Well, the gameplay in Frenzies consists of multiple different rounds. Some of these rounds are your regular shooter fare (like free for all or team death match), but there are also some rounds unique to Frenzies, like Glitter Pig, a round where you chase a pig around the map, and Push (called Button Bash in game), a round where you need to get to the opponent's side of the map and press a button. (You can see some of the round types shown off in the Frenzies trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7ZyC51foY )  Some of these different rounds will have different victory conditions, different round lengths, different team requirements and even variations in the levels needed to support them. They may even have mid-round gameplay behaviour, for example in Red...
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