Tactical RPG Prototype: Ikugunen

[DufingunTheFrogWizardKing]

Welcome to my Let's Play of Unreal Engine 4. The main purpose of this thread is to document the changes in design goals, to provide a simple sanity check and as an incentive to continue working on the project.

I've been working on it for about ten days and so far we have aiming, firing, basic damage detection, turn orders, and weapon/armour detachment when a weapon/armour piece takes too much damage.



Movement, with the open of manual pathing



Proportional–integral–derivative controlled physics "drones" that follow units around



Broadly speaking the aim is to make a simulationist turn based tactical game. Hopefully level streaming will allow me to make an arbitrarily large map but that's something I'll test once I have some basic AI in, you can see the AI skipping their turns when the red box appears and they fail to take any action.

Specific mechanics might include: Valkyria Chronicles style "overwatch" fire with automatic weapons, picking up weapons and shields mid battle after detachment, complicated mech loadouts and pilot character building, ammunition and heatsink management.

The intended fluff is that it's a post apocalyptic mech setting (think Macross after the earth gets destroyed) in which you launch assaults from a central base. The basic idea being that you hunt down specific enemy bosses and extend your ability to traverse further into dangerous regions by setting up mobile bases and grinding out better gear.

If I don't like the game after a few months I might switch to another prototype which would probably be Ogre Battle with a giant map and with more RPG detailing in the squads but with similarly hands off combat.

 

[DufingunTheFrogWizardKing]

mirrors:

 

[DufingunTheFrogWizardKing]

Just a short run down of some of the stuff implemented over the past few days.

Weapon pick up after disarming



Messing around with the idea of heavy ordnance and long range battles. There might be some real time fighting and interactions before the units come into contact and initiate the turn based mode



Weapon overheating and heat sink ejection



Manual drone placement



Behind the scenes I added a basic utility AI framework, I might use a genetic algorithm to adjust some of the weights later on but at the moment I'm not working on the AI too much because there aren't many mechanics in the game.

One likely use of the drones is as reaction fire turrets, the idea being that you can send them out to pin down enemies.

An aim for the game is to blend elements of crpgs and tactical games in party building. Mechs will have specialised classes, like traditional rpg classes, which determines what equipment they're allowed to use and your line-up will be fairly immutable. But pilots will be more like x-com soldiers, they die, they grow and a high experience pilot should be very valuable.

 

[Otay]

nice, are you implementing this so far with C++ or just unreal blueprints? (or both?)

 

[DufingunTheFrogWizardKing]

It's almost entirely in C++. I only use blueprints for hooking up the keybinds and adjusting emissive values on hit events. I'll almost certainly control animations with blueprints too when I start implementing them.

I think the biggest downside with C++ is the compile times, if you're making lots of small changes you want to test the downtime can really add up. To make things worse I usually restart the editor from the IDE when I want to test something. Having said that it usually only takes a few seconds to compile so it's not a big concern for the moment. I imagine you'd get some efficiency back in the long run when using C++ because code is easier to refactor than visual scripts.

 

[Otay]

It's almost entirely in C++. I only use blueprints for hooking up the keybinds and adjusting emissive values on hit events. I'll almost certainly control animations with blueprints too when I start implementing them.

I think the biggest downside with C++ is the compile times, if you're making lots of small changes you want to test the downtime can really add up. To make things worse I usually restart the editor from the IDE when I want to test something. Having said that it usually only takes a few seconds to compile so it's not a big concern for the moment. I imagine you'd get some efficiency back in the long run when using C++ because code is easier to refactor than visual scripts.

Ah awesome. I've thought about starting an unreal 4 project one day, I'm currently working in UDK with the unrealscript language. I feel like I compile a hundred times a day, so I feel your pain. I imagine you can use breakpoints through visual studio when you debug your code, right? I'm envious of that, I'd much prefer to work in C++ through an IDE like that. Instead of breakpoints I just spam log messages and compile over and over and over.

 

[DufingunTheFrogWizardKing]

If you want to get into Unreal 4 for your next project you should have a look at the udemy courses by Tom Looman and Ben Tristem. I don't know how different UE4 is to UDK, you might just be able to work off the documentation, but both of those courses are good.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I find Blueprints harder to parse than code.

 

[J1M]

I find Blueprints harder to parse than code.

They are a gimmick to entice studio directors by promising them that they can pay level designers instead of expensive programmers to script the game.