Player Gameplay Framework
ÖK(^)BJuly 2023 - December 2023
Built with Unreal Engine
Brief
I built the player side of ÖK(^)B in Unreal: the character and its material, how it moves, the controls and the UI. The game designer wanted three different ways to explore the reconstructed museum, with players free to switch in and out of each one.
Approach
The game is third person and multiplayer. On the ground, players explore at their own pace. In flight, they see the museum from different angles, inside an enclosed bounding box. The third mode plays cutscenes through key areas, with only skip and fast-forward. Controls are built for a gamepad, such as an Xbox controller, and the D-pad switches modes. The player controller adds and removes each mode's controls as players switch, while a base Enhanced Input profile handles the UI throughout. Every character comes from one parent class, BP_SAMCharacter, which branches into the playable character and the AI characters. The player character is a sphere whose material takes six player-set parameters. It pulses, and World Position Offset points it towards the nearest interactable zone or player. On the UI side, I programmed mode switching, the minimap and the live player count, plus all of character creation, from the sliders and controller navigation to confirming the choices.
