What better gift can one receive than the experience and exhaustion that comes from a Game Jam. As if the holidays weren’t stressful enough with family, old friends, traditions, travel, of of course that last min party preparation. With less than 3 days to jam out a game before christmas eve, despite the warm weather in the northeast, we had a snow covered mountain to climb. We elected to use Unreal Engine 4, not because we were familiar but instead the opposite. Our goal was to gain as much knowledge as quickly as possible while still producing “a game”(using a loose definition).
Our goal: make a top down constant scrolling shooter e.g. Capcom’s “1942” and sequel “1943:Battle of Midway” targeted for portrait mode on mobile devices. At the end of the first day we laid out an outline; in retrospect our goals were pretty ambitions for 2 unreal 4 noobies.
First focusing on the good, I’m going to list some of the things we managed to achieve. In game flat textured models for both the hero ship and enemy towers. Projectiles that fire from the enemy towers. A scrolling level that constantly deletes passed sections while adding new sections.
We also had player death on collision with obstacles or projectiles, adding in explosions and sound effects using unreal mobile starter content. In addition the starter content also provided us with an obstacle mesh, as a rock, and textures for the environment.
In conclusion there was a lot more we wanted to accomplish; player shooting, life gauge, collectables, points, more animation, HUD with points, and some menus. It was a fun challenge to see what we could make with an unfamiliar tool. It was a success to help us learn Unreal Engine 4 and the Blueprint visual scripting language.