Project 8 : Power To The Valley

Summary

The game concept draws from Pacific Drive, centering on vehicular exploration in an expansive world. Players navigate the environment in their adaptable car, encountering a knowledgeable mechanic early in their journey. This mechanic serves as a guide, introducing the player to the game's progression system. The mechanic explains how gathering scrap and other resources scattered throughout the landscape is crucial for advancement. These materials are essential for upgrading the player's vehicle, allowing access to new, previously restricted areas. The gameplay loop integrates exploration, resource collection, and vehicle enhancement, creating a compelling experience that motivates players to uncover the world's mysteries and progress through the story.

Details

For this project, we chose to use Unreal Engine 5 with AngelScript. As programmers, we were relatively new to this engine, so we took our time learning it while simultaneously familiarizing ourselves with AngelScript.

Contribution

PostMaster

One of my collaborations involved creating PostMaster in Unreal Engine 5 using AngelScript. The approach I took was to create an empty actor called ActorPostMaster. Within this actor, I also created a component named PostMasterComponent. This component maintained a list of all actors that had an EventComponent. With these three elements in place, we could implement events where, if something happened, we could call an actor to react to its specific event.

This section demonstrates the implementation of the PostMaster system and the process of registering EventComponents with the PostMasterComponent. As shown in the image.


NPC

I also implemented NPC to the game, combining UE5 and AngelScript. I use UE5 to create path points for the NPC to walk to. I use the settings in UE5 to visualize their locations, and since these path points are local, I transform them to world positions within the AngelScript.

We also implemented animations for the NPCs. I set it up so that a specific animation plays depending on the NPC's position. This allows the designer to choose which animation plays in each location. So, when the NPC finishes walking, it plays the animation that was chosen.