Learning Blueprints - "Shoot The Red Guys" - Simple UE4 FPS

I'm excited to announce that I have finished my first fully playable UE4 game today. Over the past couple of weeks I have worked my way through a book titled "Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine" by Brenden Sewell that I found in the library.

"Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine is a step-by-step approach to building a fully functional game, one system at a time. Starting with a basic First Person Shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior."

Basically it's a step-by-step guide to creating a simple FPS game in UE4! I did this because I had basically no experience with Blueprints at all and this was a huge gap in my knowledge and skillset that was long due filling in. Having these new skills opens up so many possibilities, both for my academic persuits and my future personal projects.

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I have called my game "Shoot The Red Guys" (for obvious reasons) and it is really rather simple, but fully functional. It is a round-based shooter in which you have to destroy a set number of enemies which increases with each round. Here's a quick rundown of the features, most of which are from the steps in the book, but some are my own additions that I created with the skills that the book taught me. It was all created with just the UE4 starter content.

• A small, basic playable area modelled loosely on a shipping container yard.
• Enemies with AI that spawn at random locations, wander around, track down, chase and attack the player.
• A health meter that depletes when attacked by enemies. I also created health pickups that refill your health and respawn after some time.
• Limited player ammo and ammo pickups that spin, emit light and respawn after a short time.
• The ability for the player to zoom in their aim and sprint.
• Pause, victory and failure screens with working save, restart round and new game functions.
• Rounds that increase in difficulty by adding a higher score requirement and more enemies spawning in.
• The round system is set up in a way that means that the game can, in theory, carry on indefinitely, only limited by player skill.
• Audio for destroying enemies, taking damage and picking up ammo and health.
• An HUD showing health, stamina, score, ammo and the current round.

Here's a video of some gameplay of the game.

So what do I hope to achieve with the skills that I have learned here? My area of focus for my MA degree is Atmosphere in Games, with my pratical work being 3D environment art. I figure that an environment can only get to a certain level of atmosphere without gameplay, so I am planning to use these skills to add some level of gameplay or interactivity to my future environment art projects. These skills are also useful to have because I can build upon them and eventually get to a point where I may be able to make an indie game for commercial release, or use them within a games company. I may also take this game further and turn it something more in the future.