ECHOES OF SALVATION
A run and gun, semi open world experience.
- Enjoy killing hordes of Aliens with different abilities and intelligence.
- Arm yourself with variety of weapon, customizations and upgrades.
- Fight. Die. Evolve.
- A vast world to explore in each map with story to discover.
Project Details
Genre : Shooter
Platform : PC
Input : Mouse and Keyboard
Engine : Unreal Engine
Time Frame : Month+(Ongoing)
Role : AI programmer, Level Designer.
Team Size : 2
Status : Ongoing
One Mission. One Bot.
Echoes of Salvation is a first-person shooter where you play as a robot tasked with defeating the alien covenant which has taken over the surface of the planet and wiped-out humanity as we know it. You fight against the horde of enemies to recover information, get stronger and gain ground against the alien threat.
Narrative
The world has been taken over by aliens of various kind. They seem to be working together even though most of them look nothing alike. Humanity took it’s last stand trying to protect Earth but failed. The best scientists gathered together to create a bio-organic robot factory that can constantly evolve to defeat the alien threat : Project Salvation. Project Salvation is a flying fortress that is self sufficient and uses any remains to created bio-organic robots called Echo. Echoes fight the alien threat, gather information and evolve based on the information. You are Echo. You must now track and go find the information to the overwhelming alien threat and find all the clues as well as weapons left behind by the human fighters.
Gameplay and Mechanics
The game is a first person shooter so much has been done to smooth out the player experience. It uses mouse and keyboard for input. The controls of the game is kept conventional. W-A-S-D is used for movement, SPACE is used to jump, LSHIFT is used to dash, E is used to interact with weapons and G throws the grenade. Using 1,2, and 3, you can cycle your weapons from primary, secondary and heavy and F cycles the type of grenade you use. You can double dash and double jump. The Player recovers health momentarily when not in combat and pick up ammo dropped by enemies by walking over them.
The player controller was created to be similar to boomer shooters like doom and quake with fast base movement speed, strafing, air control and no sprint or crouch. Movement is a key mechanic in this game to stay alive by dodging enemy attacks.
Each level is designed to be a semi open world experience. The player is expected to explore the level to find clues, weapons and information in each new level which are hidden behind hordes of enemies. Levels are also not always linear, and they have been designed to sometimes back track to find clues that are connected to levels that come after. The enemies always respawn when each level is re-entered.
The Code
Weapon Class:
The weapon system is a component-based system that defines a base class for the weapons with common variables that define how each weapon behaves. The weapons are scaled and attached to sockets on the skeletal mesh when equipped. The weapon inventory is a enumeration map with the weapon type enum as the key and the weapon base class as the value. This allows it store any weapon that is inherited from the base class under the specific key which is just the weapon name. When a weapon is picked up the component class is attached to the player actor and with communication to the animation blueprint the weapon and animation are changed.
This system was designed with scalability in mind as a new weapons can be created quite easily. As well as this each weapon can have its own firing logic and allow for different projectiles with different collision logic.
The interactable items all inherit from a base pickup class which defines just a static mesh with a sphere collider. It implements the interact interface which notifies the interactable to delete itself when its pickup up.
Enemy Class:
The enemy class consists of the base class. It has the base AI Perception functions as well as death function as well as some components that is necessary for each enemy type. Every enemy inherits from this base class.
Beyond that, each enemy has their own specific attacks and functions relating to those attacks present in their event graph.
Final Thoughts
Echoes of Salvation is a game that is incomplete but has a long list of items that is ready to be added in the future. As it is right now, it is a polished shooting experience against hordes of enemies. Unreal is a powerful engine and there is no doubt that we can do more that what we have accomplished.
With much work left to be done, we look forward to where the game ends up. Until then, this is Echoes of Salvation.
References
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