Intro In the past I created several different tech demos in order to get hands on experience with various aspects game development and gain an insight into the different systems that Unreal Engine had to offer. In August 2019, I decided that I wanted create a roguelike shooter game which would ultimately become Mark One. Project overview When I started my game development journey in 2015, I imagined that at some point in the future I would like to create my own game and publish it on Steam. Since I anticipated that I would be working on this project as a solo developer and considering that I ..read more

Welcome to the Mark One Dev Log #2! In this post I’m going to about the logic that drives ranged AI enemies in the game. Before I dive into more details about it in case you want to support my project you can wishlist on Steam using the following link: Rules of ranged enemies Each enemy wants to find a suitable location in the level from which he can shoot at the player. This location needs to meet the following criteria: The distance from the player must be <= than the attack range of each enemy (range varies between different types of enemies) The player must be visible from the locatio ..read more

Welcome to the first development log for Mark One, which is a game that I have been working on my own in the past few months. Mark One is a top down Sci-Fi shooter game, heavily influenced by Doom, with twin stick shooter elements. I feel like it’s time to start sharing my work with you, starting with this post. For today, I’m going to share the teaser trailer, a couple of screenshots and gifs as well as the first boss fight! Teaser Trailer Mechanics The game is pretty straightforward: You’re a highly trained AI agent tasked with the responsibility of disposing bots which have gone rogue. Th ..read more

About a year ago Eleftherios Kokkinakis, the owner of RedSoup Studios which was developing Westwood Shadows, a first-person puzzle solving game contacted me about the development of the AI for the game. In Westwood Shadows, you’re Peter Bennet, a police detective returning to his abandoned hometown where he confronts his past unsolved case.  Westwood Shadows is currently available as Early Access on Steam: Initial AI Design Initially, we designed a base enemy type, codenamed as ‘Shadow’, which would bring some mild horror elements to the game and challenge Peter. The original design was ..read more

How the game came to be During last year’s summer a good friend of mine was working night shifts in a restaurant. Right at the beginning of his shift he was tasked with setting up the tables for the diners to come. Once he was done, he had a downtime in which he was mostly playing some casual games on his phone. After we had a few conversations about casual games, I decided to create my own casual game for Android devices. To start things off I researched a few different genres of casual games until I realized that I wanted to build a puzzle / logic game. After a couple of days, I recalled the ..read more

In this post I’m going to show you how to create latent Blueprint nodes that have multiple execution pins inside the Editor! The code in this post is written in version 4.26 so depending on your version you may need to perform a few changes. Download the source code from my GitHub repo Creating a latent node with multiple output pins In this section, we’re going to create a latent node which will tick a few times depending on our input. For demonstration purposes, we’re going to create a node that will calculate a few fibonacci numbers in each tick. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to create nodes ..read more

In this post I’m going to show you how to create Functional Tests with the Automation System that comes with the latest version of Unreal Engine 4. With functional tests, we can simulate a user’s behavior (to some extent) and verify that everything is working properly. In this post we’re going to create a simple script that tests if the player can move X units forward to a level. Once you become familiar with the process you will be able to extend the testing functionality to interactions or more complex systems of your game. Download the source code from my GitHub repo Implementing a function ..read more

In this post I’m going to show you how to use Unreal’s Automation System in order to create unit tests for your code. Unit tests are tests written by developers in order to test various aspects of their code and identify bugs or other unintended behavior before it happens. Download the source code from my GitHub repo In order to test out the Automation System, open up the .Build.cs file of your project and add “UnrealEd” and “Engine” on the dependecy modules list: PublicDependencyModuleNames.AddRange(new string[] { "Core", "CoreUObject", "UnrealEd", "Engine", "InputCore", "HeadMountedDisplay ..read more

Welcome to the third dev log for my game! In this post I’ll provide a brief overview of the animation system running for each character.Before I dive into more details about it in case you want to support my project you can wishlist on Steam using the following link: Need of different animations In Mark One all characters are using several different animations at the any given moment. For example, if the player is running he may decide to throw a grenade or dash or he may get hit from an enemy. This presents the need to blend two or more animations together in order to provide: A more realis ..read more

Mark One is a game that I have been working on for the last few months. It’s a top down Sci-Fi shooter game, heavily influenced by Doom, with twin stick shooter elements. In this post I’m going to talk about the tutorial level of the game and how important it’s for the players. But before we dive into that, in case you want to support my development you can help me by wishlisting the game on Steam in the following link Identifying issues from the beta version When I first side-loaded the game in Steam I included a tutorial level which would launch once the player would click the “New Game” op ..read more