The scavenger
Project information
Engine | Unreal Engine 5
Platform | PC
Summary
The Scavenger is a first-person survival game project with the goal of learning design and implementation skills for an inventory/item system and animation blueprinting in UE5.
I have decided to sunset the project as I’ve now accomplished my goal of creating these systems, as well as learning the rigging and animation pipline. Continuing the project from here would also be incredibly challenging given the immense scope.
impact
Going into this project I wanted to make a complex system from the ground up, and after completing my goal the impact was immense. I feel much more confident setting up systems in engine, especially on a high level regarding the overall structure and tech debt.
Planning these systems thoroughly beforehand was something I realized the importance of, since adding new functionality to a system after logic is in place can be extremely time consuming. I realized this when trying to add in the animation logic, since some items had animations they needed to play at the same time as the player (pistol fire for example). Adding the functionality for this afterwards was a greater challenge than expected, since I failed to take it into consideration early on.
Also my animation and rigging experience from this project was super helpful, as before the animation pipeline was an area of development that I had nearly 0 experience with, both in engine and out of engine. Going through the entire process from rigging, to making animations, then to making animation blueprints for different items was an amazing learning experience. I believe this will help me work much better with animators in the future, and give me the skills to create animations myself for my prototypes.
Inventory/Item System Demo
First Pass Animation State Machine Demo
Pistol Animation Demo