This is definitely a bit of a personal story. The summer of 2023 had not been easy for me - my mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer of the stomach in April, and I was part of the massive layoff that occurred at Relic in late May. Now unemployed, I was able to help my family take care of my mother as she rapidly deteriorated over the next few months. Concurrently, I took up learning Unreal as a way of coping and to have a creative outlet - it helped me work through the stress and uncertainty and proved to be a very theraputic activity especially after my mom passed away. In addition, I feel that knowing how to work with Unreal would be a useful skill as so many industry teams use it as a tool in their workflow.

Once I had the basics of Unreal down, the decision about what exactly to make as a focused project was helped along by a friend who told me, “Just make the kind of game that would make you happy to play.” I decided to go make a spaceship game, because I was in sort of a nostalgic mood for Homeworld as Homeworld 3 would be coming out next year and I was looking forward to it and Homeworld was my original inspiration to take game development seriously as a career. As such I am utilizing a free model from Sketchfab, a Homeworld 2 frigate (fitting, as HW2 was the first dev credit I had!).

The result was that I managed to use Unreal Blueprints to put together a simple space ship game fairly rapidly. Some of the features it currently has:

• I cobbled together a spaceship thrust and vector system from tutorials, and managed to fix an infinite speed bug

• Working (mostly) turrets and a way to unlock them for manual aiming in a “tactical" mode”

• Via Components, a damage model that can take into account what kind of damage is being applied to something, and also what kind of damage something can cause to others. This provides a helpful framework for making more weapons in the future

• Via Components, a health tracking system

• Destructible asteroids that break into chunks (using the physics system inherent to Unreal) and a random asteroid spawning system

• Player spaceship ambient audio that gets stronger the closer to the spaceship the player zooms in. I grabbed some audio of a carrier’s bridge talk and ambience, distorted it, and layered on additional random radio static and voices. Then I applied it to Unreal’s built in audio attenuation system. People who have seen what I’ve done remark it added a lot to the “life” of the spaceship

• Basic particle system by the engines to simulate engine glows and trails

• A framework to store information for additional ship classes that can be duplicated to account for other factions beside the player’s - useful for stats and menu screens

• Placeholder HUD that shows the current speed of the ship.

• Simple menu flow that allows the player to start a new game, get a briefing, select a ship, get into a simple level, access a pause menu that can quit the game or exit back to the main menu (and also quit from there as well).

• Simple targeting system for targeting closest target, with UI for indicating target and text displaying basic information about the target