Team #41 - The Streets of Edith Finch

Inspiration

I love videogames. There are so many things that we can't do in the real world because we are limited to the laws of physics. There are so many scenarios that would be too horrible to put ourselves in if it were the real world. But in the virtual world of videogames, you can make the impossible happen quite easily. But beyond that, they're just fun! Who doesn't enjoy some stress-relief from working hard at school to go and game with your friends? Especially now with COVID restrictions, videogames are a way for people to be interconnected and to have fun with each other without worrying about catching a deadly disease.

What it does

The Streets of Edith Finch is a first-person shooter, battle royale style game built with the impressive graphics of Unreal Engine 4. Players are spawned into the unique level design where they can duke it out to be the last man/woman standing.

How I built it

Using Unreal Engine 4 to simulate the physics and effects and develop the frameworks for actors. Textures are community-based from the Epic Games Community. Functionality, modes, and game rules were built in C++ and Blueprints (Kesmit) and developed directly in the engine's source code.

Challenges I ran into

Unreal Engine has A LOT of modules and classes so navigation was definitely not easy especially since this my first time working with it. Furthermore, Unreal engine introduces a lot of Unreal specific syntaxes that do not follow traditional C++ syntax so that was also a learning curve. Furthermore, simulating the physics behind ragdolls and pushing over certain entities was also difficult to adjust.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The fact that this is actually playable! Was not expecting the game to work out as well as it did given the limited experience and lack of manpower being a solo group.

What I learned

I learned that game development on it's own is a whole other beast. The coding is merely a component of it. I had to consider textures and shadow rendering, animations, physics, and playability all on top of managing module cohesion and information hiding in the actual code.

What's next for The Streets of Edith Finch

Make level design much larger - not enough time this time around. This will allow for support for more players (level is small so only about 2-3 players before it gets too hectic). Furthermore, spawn points need to be fixed as some players will spawn at same point. Crouching and sprinting animations need to be implemented as well as ADSing. Finally, player models are currently missing textures as I couldn't find any good ones in the community right now that weren't >$100 lol.

Built With

• blueprints
• c++
• kesmit
• unreal-engine