SoloSoul Overview

Project made following a Udemy Course Unreal Engine 5 C++ The Ultimate Game Developer Course by Stephen Ulibarri

What the course was about:

Learning Unreal Engine 5's new features from Open World maps, Quixel Bridge megascans for ultra-realistic environments, landscape sculpting and painting, dungeons, free-roaming creatures and humanoids with various weapons, breakable objects that spawn treasure, and more!

Slay your way through your open world level, hacking and slashing creatures, breaking pots and collecting treasure and souls, and try to keep your health and stamina high!

Implementing enemy behavior that can be reused for various creature types, including gruntlings, raptors, insects, and golems. Code your character to be able to pick up and equip better and better weapons as she slays stronger and stronger monsters and collects loot.

Covering new Unreal Engine 5 features such as Motion Warping, Meta Sounds, Linked Anim Graphs, UE5's new retargeting system with IK Rigs and IK Retargeters, Leg IK with Control Rigs, visual effect creation in Niagara, and more!

Starting with a completely empty level and add everything from sky and atmosphere, nature, trees and plants, and we'll even import an entire dungeon level with the use of UE5's new Packed Level Instance feature.

Covering vectors and game development mathematics in a full math section to prepare you for gameplay programming before diving in and creating our first C++ class.

Learning Unreal Engine's class hierarchy, creating a basic Actor, learning about trigonometry as we use the sine function to give our items floating behavior.

Creating a Bird using the Pawn class so we can fly around our level and get a literal bird's-eye view.

Creating our Character class, using Echo from the Valley of the Ancient Epic-released free project, a beautiful and lifelike humanoid with cloth physics on her scarf and garments.

Implementing weapon equipping and combat. We learn how to calculate directional hit reactions, using root motion animations to make our enemies stumble in the correct direction based on the direction of impact.

Giving our enemies patrolling behavior, then chasing and attacking behavior. We make our enemies smarter with the use of UE5's new Motion Warping system, warping our enemy's location and rotation to make it hit the target more frequently, and making it harder to move out of harm's way.

Giving Echo a fighting chance, by implementing a dodge ability, similar to Dark Souls and Elden Ring. She can dodge out of the way while the enemy swings fervently, making them miss so we can move in to counter-attack.

Making breakable pots and vases using the Chaos destruction system, and these breakables spawn treasure when we break them, allowing us to collect loot and increment our gold count in the HUD.

Creating a beautiful Soul effect in Niagara, and make enemies spawn souls upon death so we can gain experience points.

Learning how to make enemies stronger with an Attribute component, giving them varying levels of health and damage, and soul spawn counts.

Using UE5's new Animation Blueprint Templates to reuse all of our enemy code to create different types of enemies, from humanoids that wield weapons to creatures that bite, sting, and smash.