|Shotgun Shootout|
Immersive FPS with Manual Weapon Controls
TEAM SIZE: Individual
ROLES: Design, Programming, Audio, Art
TOOLS: Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Ableton Live
DEVELOPMENT TIME: Three months
STATUS: Experimental prototype/learning exercise
Features
- First person shooter based around various shotguns
- True first person character with full body mesh and procedural animations for all arm interactions, including recoil, aiming down sights, pumping, reloading, and more
- Manually pump the shotgun with mouse controls that mirror the real operation of a shotgun pump
- Click and hold, then drag down to eject a shell and drag up to load a new one
- Manually reload shotgun shells of various ammo types using mouse inputs
- Physics based projectiles with material penetration and ricochet
- Precise deadzone aiming seen in games like Insurgency Sandstorm and Rising Storm 2
Overview
This project is a recreation of a system prototype I created in February of 2019 that I’ve decided to tentatively call Shotgun Shootout. I liked this system so much that I decided to remake it as a vessel to learn and become comfortable with Unreal Engine 4, a goal which I have most definitely achieved as a result of this project. Currently, the project features a fleshed out first person shooter weapon interaction system complete with kinetic shooting, recoil aim punch, manual operation of the weapon’s action with the mouse, manual reloading with the mouse, and different ammunition types. The system also features a full body character model, or a “true first person” perspective and uses fully procedural IK animations for all arm based actions.
I’ve stopped development on this project, as I feel that it served it’s purpose for me as a vessal to learn UE4 with. That being said, I enjoy the mechanics I developed here and want to incorporate them into my next game project.
Despite not working on the game itself, I wrote a blog post series in a semi tutorial esque format where I explain all the core features of the game as well as how I made them.