GALAXY DEFENDER
Defend alien planets against invaders from heaven in this short first person shooter! As my first project in Unreal Engine 5, I wanted to get a good grasp of the possibilities UE provides. By using blueprints and taking advantage of assets from within UE5´s ecosystem, I was able to focus myself on using the tools provided within the engine to make a full experience.
PROJECT DETAILS
Platform: PC
Tools used: Unreal Engine 5, Quixel, Blender, Photoshop, Bandlab, Audacity
Team size: 1
Project started: 25-04-2023
Project finished: 31-07-2023
Learning goal: designing a game within UE5 using the tools available
By the time I started work on Galaxy Defender, I already had a decent amount of experience making games in Unity that continues to increase to this day. At the same time however I want to branch out and not limit myself to one engine when it comes to my game projects, which is why was curious to try out Unreal.
Around the same time I was also once again pondering about new ideas for personal projects. One of them that has been floating in my mind was a sci-fi first person shooter where you fight off an invasion from a godlike alien civilization in waves on procedurally generated planets, while having some complex lore involving the multiverse, simulation theory, and many other existential dread invoking things.
As could perhaps be imagined from that description however, the idea was rather ambitious for a first project in a brand new engine. As such I had to make some cuts to make this project feasible, but I wanted to keep the essentials. The basic gameplay of shooting aliens is still there, and there are still several alien planets to explore even if they're not procedurally generated. And while the narrative is not quite as present as I envisioned it at first, it is still being hinted at throughout several game elements letting players make up their own interpretation.
Once I started development, I managed to figure out the basics relatively quickly with the knowledge I already had from working in Unity. By starting out with the first person template, I was able to figure out how to make immersive worlds using the terrain and foliage in a short time. Blueprints were slightly more challenging to get into as someone who is used to coding, but with some practice I managed to make it all work.
For this project I also decided to rely much more heavily on free assets available within Unreal's ecosystem as opposed to my Unity projects where I tend to make all of the art myself. I did this because I felt like it was more important to dedicate my time to understanding how to use the engine itself. Environments such as Quixel and the Marketplace offer high quality assets for free, and the time I saved not having to make these assets could instead be used to experiment more with blueprints and new features.
And with that, I ended up with not just another finished game project, but one that taught me how to work in a brand new game engine. While the scope in the end might not be as ambitious as the original concept or even some of my Unity games, it is a project that taught me a lot about Unreal and it has set the foundation for future projects that can go even further with this engine. And who knows, perhaps I'll even revisit my original concept one day...