UNREAL ENGINE WORKSHOP

I went for this workshop, the Unreal Engine Workshop, on 31 May. The way this workshop was carried out was that a lecturer was there to teach us about how to use the Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is actually a complicated platform which programmers can use to program games. Since I have an elective that is related to creation of games, I felt that this workshop may be useful and thus attended it.

In this workshop, many things that were taught and honestly, I could not understand most of it as at that point of time, I have never used Unreal Engine or even played around with the functions in the engine before. This resulted in me not being able to comprehend some of what the lecturer was teaching. The first half of the workshop was more geared towards teaching how to animate and creating smooth player movements. The lecturer mentioned that this aspect is to educate animators instead of programmers as it is the animators’ job to produce a good character design and also have good movement animations. Quite a load of things were being taught like how the x and y coordinates affects where the player stands and the overall height or width of the other objects used in the platform. He even went through minute details of animation like the distance before a player will reveal her actual character. An example of what I meant is that, another player standing 10 meters away from my own player can have his character only show its outline while being completely milky white. After being less than 10 metres away from my own player, that other player will then show its actual character in more detail and not only in an outline. Then, he proceeded on to also adjusting the camera angles of the platform. At first, the camera angle was fixed and thus, he decided to make the camera follow the player at a certain distance. I felt that this is an important aspect to take note of as the camera angle is important in making the experience much more enjoyable for the player. Furthermore, depending on the game that is played, the use of the camera angle will play an essential role. For example, if it was a first person shooter game, the player should not be shown and instead only the weapon can be seen while a third person shooter game allows the player to be able to see his own character. Therefore, the use of camera angles aids in the experience of the gameplay.

The second part of the workshop was then geared more towards the programming aspect of the game. Something which the lecturer programmed that caught my attention was the fireball. Although I was unable to understand a few parts of what he was saying, I still felt that what he did was pretty cool and thought that it is actually important to implement this sort of elements in a game as it is visually appealing. He then went on to program the fireball by ensuring it shots out from the player. After programming that animation, he then made sure that after getting hit twice by the fireball, the enemies will “die” and disappear. He went through which parts of the programs we should alter and how the numbers actually affects the final results. Along the way, he realised that after firing the fireball towards the wall, the fireball will stay there and if the player were to go towards it, he would also be “killed”. In order to fix this problem, he actually made some changes to the codes and ensured that the player will not be affected by his own attacks. After managing to get the simple game running without much issues, he concluded the session by showing us a video that was done using this Unreal Engine.

After being through this workshop, I personally felt more motivated to create games as I thought that the process is very interesting and there are actually many things that I can do with the engine. Moreover, having always been interested in games, it intrigues me even more as the quality of the engine was very good and the fact that there are many functions made the experience even more exciting.