RedDragonMakesGames

 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...

  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...

  Getting it back: The concept: I returned to Unreal for this one; I decided I wanted to use the engine before I decided on the concept, but I soon came up with the idea of doing a volleyball game. This gave me the chance to experiment and practice a bit more with physics in unreal, and manipulating objects as desired. Unlike previous games in Unreal, I didn't tie myself to using C++ or blueprints, and instead decided to just use what made the most sense to me at the time. Suprisingly, I ended up using blueprints a lot more than I expected, I think because some of the logic behind them was starting to click with me, and I understood more that I could consider blueprint hierachy the same way as hierachy in C++. The challenge:  The first thing I looked at for this game was the physics, and making the ball feel the right amount of floaty so that it was possible to hit back, but also allow it to fly at a decent speed so that the player could add a decent amount of force to it. I p...

  Pathing: The concept:  Sorry about not putting out a minigame last week! I was suffering from a nasty cold, which luckily has mostly gone now. For this minigame, I wanted to use C++ scripting in Unreal. I started with a top down game, and was instantly interested by the pathing that the player followed when you gave it a location (in other news, I've been looking into the A* pathing algorithm, but in this game I didn't play with the algorithm, I just used it). After tweaking how the player was controlled a bit, I decided to make a maze game, where the character will automatically path, but will path into barriers that will reset their position if the player doesn't take care of them. The challenge: The big issue I faced here was finding the right Unreal API to do the things I wanted to do. At first, this project lulled me into a false sense of security; holding down the button made the player move directly to the cursor; I didn't want that, so I adapted the code so ho...

  Seek and Shoot: The concept: Last week I made a minigame in Unity, so this time I wanted to make a minigame in Unreal. Although I haven't completed a major project in Unreal yet, I've been learning about developing with Unreal and in particular blueprints as a way of defining gameplay behaviour. For the gameplay itself, I decided to build on the first person example in Unreal, and make a game where you had to search around a play field to find and shoot a red target. The challenge: Starting with the first person template helped a bit with setting up the game, but there was still plenty to do to adapt it to the game I wanted. For example, I didn't want the player to have to pick up the gun, so instead I edited the rifle's blueprint to bind to the player on game start. To create the target, I created a prefab, and then wrote a blueprint that would handle when it was hit. To keep track of the score and the time, I created another blueprint class that would store variable...