Project Description
Trust Funds is a cooperative top-down-shooter heist game that I developed within a ten person team for the 2023 Shawnee State Game Jam. It's design was heavily inspired by the board game Nemesis. All players are tasked with a core objective, but each player also has a hidden agenda that may require them to work against their team. This could be anything from a requirement that that player be caught on security camera to a requirement that another player not survive to the end of the heist, and both the heist and hidden objectives must be completed to count as a victory. In the week we had to develop this project, I worked primarily on the player's line of sight system.
Accomplishments
- Implemented player line of sight system.
- Assisted in programming the interaction system.
- Built functionality for a game lobby.
Objectives and Implementation
With this jam taking place just a couple weeks before the end of the fall semester, myself and the rest of the team had little time to dedicate to the jam despite the week given to us. Therefore, my goal was to focus on the addition of the player line of sight mechanic. This would be a high-impact feature to add into the game that would require me to learn more about materials and postprocessing in UE5, topics that until now I had been largely unfamiliar with.
Unfortunately, I can't take too much credit for the implementation: the process I used was referenced from this great article by Christian Sparks. However, I can explain the gist of how it works. Tiny instances of a static mesh placed in a radius around the player are each scaled until they collide with an object in the world. Those meshes are then rendered to a RenderTarget. Finally, a postprocess material is created which culls pixels that correspond to the areas on the RenderTarget where the meshes were not rendered.
From the gameplay trailer, it's clear that the system could be improved on in a few ways. There's a tiny bit of space that remains visible beyond obstructing objects. This could probably be fixed by adjusting some settings in the existing system, though I was unable to solve the issue at the time (there were more important features to work on and I needed to move on). I also would have liked to display something in the obstructed areas rather than pure darkness - perhaps an outline of the room and the objects placed within - but time did not allow for that idea to be explored.
My other major role on the project involved setting up the infrastructure for getting players connected and set up in game. The code above from the Lobby GameMode shows how the game handles another player connecting to the host. It initializes data for the player, randomizes their equipment, then sets the player's hidden agenda and updates the lobby UI.
Unfortunately, the online elements for the game did not come together all the way by the end. However, I am proud of how much I was able to put together in the limited time I had. My work on Chaos Pattern taught me a great deal about network programming in Unreal, and what took me a couple weeks to research and finish for that project I was able to mostly implement in just a few days.
Reflection
This was an incredibly fun jam to be a part of. Our team was very motivated and excited about our concept, which in hindsight was likely overscoped. The game isn't entirely in a playable state; several features were implemented right before the deadline and there was not a lot of time to test multiplayer functionality. However, many members of the team are optimistic about revisiting this project in the future, and I'm hopeful that we might realize our vision one day.
The best part of working on this project was getting my first experience with creating custom materials and postprocessing effects in Unreal. It's not an aspect of the engine that I plan to specialize in, but I believe that it's important for me to familiarize myself with as much as I can. Knowing more about UE generally will make it easier to collaborate with people who work on other areas on the game. In future projects, it will certainly be a useful tool to have available.