I’ve been talking to a developer and he says one of the things he wished he knew after making his first game in Unreal is he wished he would have known to first make his own framework inside Unreal (and prob C++) so that he could much more easily make his future games. He could finish one game and then turn around and using this framework, he could change values around and animations, but everything he needed would essentially already be there, and he could make another game in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the work it would take him otherwise. He said it didn’t matter if he was making a first person shooter, or a side-scroller or any other type of game it would all be transferable. This is what I want to learn how to do, This is my course idea.
That’s a very good idea to wrap the engine you are working in. It’s generally good engineering practice too as it means you could switch engine if you ever needed to. What kind of behaviour did you friend feel then needed to wrap in Unreal?
He didn’t go into too much detail but this is what I took away: Basically anything that is not aesthetic that can be a template from one game to the next. The things you will always need or things that will speed up creation greatly. One thing he was specifically talking about was it making him be able to create multiple weapons (as in 20-30… a huge number if you ask me) in the time it took him to create one weapon before. All things can be tweaked from one game to the next if need be but the point of this would be to minimize work and maximize output.
Some things that could be included are: a damage system (maybe include elemental, spike, randomize damage), a weapon system/template, Physics, the basis of a menu, HUD, All settings (game, video, audio, controls(of course controls may be different from one game type to the other) etc.), to name a few off the top of my head. Is there any more anybody else can think off the top of THEIR head? I also like the thought that it would make it easy to cross over from one engine to the other.
Here are some SETTNGS that could be relevant:
Game:
Campaign Difficulty
Crosshair Style
Enable HUD
Compass
Boss Health Bar
Interaction Prompt
Objective Notifications
Objective Markers
Tutorials
Controller: (these controller settings are specific to FPS, but you gotta start somewhere i guess)
Controller Layout ( Perhaps controller key binding)
Horizontal Sensitivity
Vertical Sensitivity ( Perhaps combine horizontal and vertical into “look” sensitivity)
Look Smoothing
Invert Look
Vibration
Aim Assist
Enable Controller
Mouse and Keyboard:
Key Bindings
Invert Mouse Look
Mouse Look Speed
Audio:
Master Volume
Music Volume
SFX Volume
Voices Volume (for multiplayer)
Sub Titles
Video:
Window Mode ( full screen, borderless window, windowed mode)
Monitor
Aspect Ratio
Resolution
Vertical Sync
Colorblind Mode
Gamma
Motion Blur
Chromatic Aberration
Field of View
Advanced:
Graphics API (I’m hoping Unreal will adopt Vulkan soon)
Overall Quality
Resolution Scale
Lights Quality
Shadows Quality
Players Self-Shadow ( On or off )
Directional Occlusion Quality
Decal Quality
Decal Filtering ( Anisotropic 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X )
Virtual Texturing Page Size
Reflections Quality
Particles Quality
Compute Shaders ( On or off )
Motion Blur Quality
Depth of Field ( On or off )
Depth of Field Antialiasing ( On or off )
HDR Bloom ( On or off )
Lens Flare ( On or off )
Lens Dirt (On or Off)
Sharpening Amount
Film Grain
UI Opacity
Show Performance Metrics