University Project - Mech Head

A Mech Shooter with varying enemies, weapons and ammo.

Gameplay Video


Description

As a Mech Pilot, you're deployed to a terrorist incident in the city.
Your job as a battle-hardened mech pilot is to defend the city and destroy the terrorists.
They may be heavily armed so take weapons and resources from the ruins of their mechs.
Good luck.

Background

This was a project I was given in the first year of my Games Programming Course at Staffordshire University, we were tasked with creating a Mech-Shooter from the framework provided - called Mech Head.

This was given to use to teach us how to use Unreal (4) and how Blueprints work. As this was a Foundation Year project it was used as a way to teach people the "flow" of programming.

The framework given was bare-bones and I had to create my own Weapons and Enemies from the assets and built-in blueprints provided. I learned very quickly from the base blueprints and adapted them to suit my needs. Originally, the player could not pick up enemies weapons, however as a way of both providing the player with different weapons in a diagetic fashion, I decided to add the functionality.

Enemies also did not drop anything on death - like Ammo or Health, so I added a system that - based on what the enemies main weapon's ammo type was - dropped the ammo on the ground when the mech gets destroyed. The system also allowed for me to create my own drops so I could control how much resources were provided to the player so I could create a sense of scarsity with ammo while giving the player enough to get through the level without running out of ammo (unless they waste ammo).

The weapon infomation popup that is displayed when you hover over a weapon was modified to include additional data about the weapon, originally only the damage and which arm it was for. I added data such as rate of fire, ammo cost per shot and ammo type.