Untitled Puzzle Platformer Adventure Game
A work in progress
A long-term side-project
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a game in Unreal Engine 5.1 with some friends as a hobby project. We have all taken up this project as a way to hone our skills in a game project in a popular industry game engine.
The main focus of my work on the project has been creating animations for our player character, Yuhana, and implementing them in the engine. I’ve been using Blender as my main animation software, to experiment with free software in the game development pipeline. I’ve also been experimenting with how I can transfer Maya techniques over to other software packages.
In addition to creating animations for the game, I am also responsible for their implementation in Unreal Engine. I redid the main character’s animation blueprint with a variation of the Lyra demo. I decided to not implement animation layers into the animation blueprint, as it caused a few errors and could be too complex for the needs of our single player game. The animation blueprint reads data from the player character blueprint in a thread-safe manner, has stride-warping, orientation-warping, and distance-matched stops.
The animation blueprint also needs to handle multiple forms of locomotion. We have normal ground locomotion and movement on a ledge which are dealt with inside of their own locomotion state machines. There is also another locomotion system for the character pushing around a large object.
As the project continues, I continue to do more work for both authoring animations and hooking them up to new systems. I’ve got a long list of animations that I hope to get through by the alpha of this project.
Additional Experience
This project has also encouraged me to hone my organizational skills. I’ve helped create game design documents, taken meeting notes, crafted MVP checklists, and organized planning discussions. With my broad knowledge of various aspects of the game dev pipeline, I try and help organize the team by tracking progress, asking pertinent questions on how to move forward, and pitching in with software/pipeline troubleshooting as my knowledge allows.
I have also taken the time to learn how to direct myself more effectively. I have created tracking documents and spreadsheets to keep tabs on how much work I can scope for myself at a given time. As I work on this project on my own time, I have to budget the time I have to deliver work effectively as the game progresses.
In the small team working on this project, I am the only animator. It is a careful balance of devoting time to help organize the team and working on animations. As we make progress with this project, we learn new things and become more capable game devs.
Project Responsibilities:
Character animation
Engine implementation
Character design
Project organization
Game Testing
Previous Iterations…
The animations and systems have gone through a few refreshes, as I’ve updated the character rig, animation blueprint, and refactored animation systems. Here’s some of the work from those older versions.
Through experimentation and a few tutorials, I completed my second attempt at the player character’s animation blueprint. This ABP was governed by a layered animation system based of off Epic’s Lyra system. We found that the layered animation approach may have been too complex for a singleplayer experience without multiple weapons and combat, so I simplified the system. This simplification had the added benefit of being easier to understand for the programmers on the team
Early animation testing of our player character. The model and rig have changed a good deal since then.
This is a playblast of a climb animation that didn’t end up making the cut. I felt that the climb animation was too slow and decided to replace it with something a little faster. We also refactored the initial pose of the climb to allow the player to be more mobile on the ledge. I’ve since made a couple of iterations on the climb animation.