My favorite part of tinkering with Unreal has been finding solutions to problems I hadn’t expected!
The type of game I’m working on doesn’t really necessitate camera zoom functionality, but who doesn’t want to be able to zoom in on their character and check out their swag?!
Without further ado, here’s the Blueprint:
I’m using the Enhanced Input system to bind the zoom to the mouse wheel. You can play around with the min/max values on the clamps to get the zoom that’s right for you.
I think anyone who plays video games has, at one point or another, dreamt of making their OWN game.
There’s always that ONE thing you wished your favorite game did or had, right?
My friends and I have been grumbling for YEARS as we rotate through games. Looking for a multiplayer experience that we can never quite find (or even put our finger on).
This led me to finally deciding to pick up Unreal Engine 5 a few months ago.
Now, I’m not a complete noob in the arena of game design/development. Years (more like a decade) ago I was a fairly active member of the Skyrim/Fallout modding community and also built a handful of primitive projects in Unity.
Screenshot from one of my first Unity projects in 2015.
Additionally, at my day job (systems engineer) I’m expected to learn many new, and often complex, systems in a relatively short amount of time – a skill that has been a huge asset in my technical career.
That said, getting started with Unreal Engine is still no easy task.
It’s such a feature-rich piece of software that it becomes a double-edged sword, in that its many features can quickly become overwhelming.
While looking for a starting point, I came across SmartPoly’s YouTube channel, which then led me to his Survival Game Course. I bought the course and sunk a ton of time going through the lectures and learning as much as I possibly could about the ins and outs of the engine.
The course is a great deep dive, but I started realizing that a survival game wasn’t quite what I was looking to create (despite putting a ton of time into MANY games in the survival genre). About half way through the course I decided to start a couple of new projects, each a different type/genre of game, and see what stuck.
The one I had the most fun tinkering with was a third-person hack-and-slash type game. The camera position and movement I had created felt a little like Arrowhead’s 2014 Gauntlet (a game that I think is criminally underrated, as someone who spent MANY weekends in GameWorks playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy as kid).
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy arcade flyer (2000, if you couldn’t tell).
Now I’m working my way down the road of figuring out what I (realistically) could bring to this genre of game that would be new, and above all, fun!
