Sergeant Transmission: Pigeons of War
Another year – another Global Game Jam! It lasted 48h and this year topic was: “Transmission”.
Me and my colleague wanted to show the old way of message transmission – through the post pigeons, during the World War. We’ve also accepted the challange given to us by the other game jammer – to make a multiplayer game.
The game was made in Unreal Engine 4 with blueprints only (almost). I was curious if it is possible to make a replication with them and it seems it is quite easy to do!
Still, the big problem was the movement replication, which works great out of the box only when you use the standard movement model (for TPP, FPS like games, with walking/running/jumping humanoid character). Because we needed flight model – the movement replication was made basicaly from scratch. This is why it works well only via LAN where there is no lag. Also – we didn’t have any online subsystem like Steam or Photon to do NAT travesals, so only local network could do a proper connection.
After the gameplay was done – we’ve discovered that it is trivial to make a local split-screen multiplayer from it! This shows us how multiplayer mechanisms in UE4 are well planned.
To make models we’ve used the MagicVoxel. It is a fantastic application for fast model making, highly recommended! After that we could play around with neat effects like exponential height fog and light shafts.
There are of course things we didn’t manage to finish, like better sounds, music, effect when colliding with buildings, etc. But, in overall – I’m very happy and satisfied from our creation :)
I've published source on GitHub, so You can grab it and play around if you want.
Or You can just grab a game from here and play. Just read a description about controls because we didn't have time to put proper info to the game ;)
Me and my colleague wanted to show the old way of message transmission – through the post pigeons, during the World War. We’ve also accepted the challange given to us by the other game jammer – to make a multiplayer game.
The game was made in Unreal Engine 4 with blueprints only (almost). I was curious if it is possible to make a replication with them and it seems it is quite easy to do!
Still, the big problem was the movement replication, which works great out of the box only when you use the standard movement model (for TPP, FPS like games, with walking/running/jumping humanoid character). Because we needed flight model – the movement replication was made basicaly from scratch. This is why it works well only via LAN where there is no lag. Also – we didn’t have any online subsystem like Steam or Photon to do NAT travesals, so only local network could do a proper connection.
After the gameplay was done – we’ve discovered that it is trivial to make a local split-screen multiplayer from it! This shows us how multiplayer mechanisms in UE4 are well planned.
To make models we’ve used the MagicVoxel. It is a fantastic application for fast model making, highly recommended! After that we could play around with neat effects like exponential height fog and light shafts.
There are of course things we didn’t manage to finish, like better sounds, music, effect when colliding with buildings, etc. But, in overall – I’m very happy and satisfied from our creation :)
I've published source on GitHub, so You can grab it and play around if you want.
Or You can just grab a game from here and play. Just read a description about controls because we didn't have time to put proper info to the game ;)