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Outlaws of Orion

This is a very passionate project, and it is truly unbelievable how much we have achieved.

It was developed by a class of 18 students (Late 4 Class Games) as a part of our term project. The project is being developed further by a team of 8 out of the initial team. The game is projected for a demo release on Steam.

I am the project co-manager along with my friend George Dimitrakis. Other hats I had to wear; Lead Game Designer, Gameplay and Online Programmer.

The game is a Metroidvania Co-op Adventure with light RPG elements. The formula was always to make this game as it could be a journey that a group of players can experience together.

Intro

It starts with the crew being chased by space police as they are escaping from a gig. They evade the cops and find a place to hide in an asteroid field. While exploring the asteroid they're on, they uncover something that was lost for ages, and a new adventure begins.

The original idea for prototyping was simple: 4 different characters as separate classes and gameplay styles. With this baseline, I developed the design for the game alongside 3 other designers from my class.

Many challenges were faced in the initial stages of design, as the camera had to be changed. In the beginning, it was supposed to be a third-person perspective game, but a week into the design and brainstorming sessions, we landed on an isometric perspective for the game.

The design process involves a lot of different aspects: combat, abilities, skills, ultimate, and upgrade system. We wanted each character to have their own personality and power fantasy.

A unique aspect of the game is that every character has an intrinsic skill that helps them unlock certain areas of the level or unblock the progression of the level in some way, which ties in with one of the pillars of the game, Co-op.

My responsibilities were making sure the goals assigned to the design team were met within the deadline and managing/updating the game design document as per the iterations.

Game Design Document -

The team had a total of 4 programmers, including me.

I assumed the role of consolidating all the blueprints and code into a streamlined and cohesive pattern to ensure fluency throughout the project.

This is an online co-op game. A lot of game mechanics were initially developed offline by the team without checking their relevancy. My job was to later on ensure it was replicated for an online environment with optimal network usage.

Many challenges were faced when learning online coding at first. Further down the line, we also had to optimize the code for less network lag. Thus all aspects of code were precisely monitored to which aspects to be fully replicated and which should not be.

Along with online programming, I was also in charge of programming systems in the game, such as the ability system, upgrade system, attack system, AI enemies, and so forth. Some of my scripts are shown below.

Base Character BP
[All characters in game are a child of this class]

Walk The game has dynamic camera in certain situations. Hence, the movement is with respect to the camera location.
Jump Jump with different events for child characters to override.
Interact Interact logic only works on objects with Interact interface.
Aim Aiming in the game gives range to certain characters where the Camera zooms out and gives them more vision.
Aim Replication Replication part for aiming. While aiming characters movement speed decreases.
Shoot/Attack Shooting Mechanic and their Replication. The main logic for this is handled in BP component, attack system.
Dash Dash and its replication. Dash anticipates where the character is going to land by traces and provides a perfect location for Dash.
Calculate Dash Location Calculating the furthest location, the character can dash without being obstructed by anything or falling off a ledge.

Loot System

Enemy Drops Function gives drops as soon as enemies die. Values and chances come from a data table of enemy drops.
Random from Range Calculating how many drops to give with respect to the Chances on it.
Chest and Breakable Loot Drop Drops when opening different types of chests or breaking a breakable object
Chest Drops Drops from the chest vary with the level of the player.

Enemy AI [Behavior tree]

Melee AI Behavior for the Melee Enemy
Ranged AI Behavior for the Ranged Enemy
Golem Mini Boss Behavior for the first boss the players encounter in the game. Later used as a Mini boss.
Frozen State Sub-behavior tree for the enemy when hit or in any such cases.
Passive State State where enemy goes along the patrol route and is non-lethal.
AI Attack Task Attack tasks are used in the behavior tree for all AIs in the game.

Attack System

Primary Attack Attack replication and attack structure with all damage values and montage for each character.
Multishpere and Team Damage Multisphere trace for ranged and melee attacks.
Team and Non Team Damage Function checks if the character is on the same team and damages the enemy. The integer calculates how many targets to damage; e.g., if a bullet damages 1, if a melee attack damages all in trace.
AOE Attack Function for AOE attack, which is completely flexible and generates an AOE at the location passed.
Alternate and Ultimate Charge Functions give alternate and ultimate charges to the player based on the number of hits and the number of enemies slain.

Insight

Zenaida's Healing Ability

The Mage Character of the Group, Zenaida has a pet named Rose that follows her and has some important gameplay abilities alongside the character.
One of these abilities is the Healing Anchor, where the player chooses a location for the companion to move to and do her healing AOE, which provides continuous health points to you and all the allies in the radius for a duration.

The Ability was pretty straight forward to make. Below is the Function RPC_HealAnchor

The problem arrived while replicating the Ability.
After much research on Unreal's online applications, soon I came to find out that the mouse location we were selecting from a client will not reflect on the AI pet, as all the AIs are technically handled by the server side.
After many failed solutions for about a week. I found the permanent solution and how to get this working.
I made a ProvideLocation function in the Pet AI controller.

This Function gets the owner client's controller Binds to a dispatcher UpdatedMouseLocation, to run LocationUpdated event and runs a function OC_MouseLocationUnderCursor
'OC_' means running only on the Owner client that is the actor who is doing the ability at this moment.
This is done in the Player controller as the player controller is a class where it is relevant to the owner clients and the server. There is no client-to-client relevancy here. So this is the perfect class to do this.

Outlaws of Orion get client mouse location from player controller

The 'OC' function intern calls the RPC_MouseLocationUnderCursor which is relevant to the server and passes the location vector under the client mouse.
RPC_MouseLocationUnderCursor calls a dispatcher UpdatedMouseLocation with the mouse location as the input.
LocationUpdated event bound to the dispatcher is triggered and provides a vector to the Blackboard Variable PointOfInterest

Further, The State of the Pet is changed to Ability1 as seen in the HealAnchor function.

When in Ability1 State the Pet AI moves to the PointOfInterest as we updated the variable with new values and does the Healing AOE.

Outlaws of Orion Healing ability AI Behavior tree

Gameplay Video of the ability

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