Devlogs
This marks the beginning of my development journey to create the upcoming 4-player cooperative first-person shooter, Overrunners. Work together to escape an alien invasion and live to tell the tale. The plan is to launch it on Steam, and I’ll be documenting the process along the way.
The Concept
Being a long-time fan of the Left 4 Dead series, I aim to create a game that offers a similar sense of replayability, unpredictability and fun cooperative gameplay. For this game, our heroes will be battling against hordes of aliens, starting in a coastal town in Southern England. This is a setting not often depicted in video games, only now it is tainted by the hordes of an alien invasion. Is anywhere safe anymore?
The Current State of Overrunners
The game development is well underway, with many features already implemented. Here is a summary of what has been done so far:
- The heroes have been designed, modelled and animated (improvements to be made).
- Various weapons and items that players can pick up and use.
- Interactable objects such as doors, switches and event triggers.
- Players can switch weapons and reload their weapon.
- Players can create and join lobbies, select a character, select a level and set the level difficulty.
- Players can be downed, helped back up, and healed.
- A HUD that tracks player health, weapon equipped and ammo count.
- The main enemies have been designed, modelled and animated (improvements to be made).
- Enemies chase and attack players when they detect them.
- Enemies can climb certain obstacles when chasing players.
- Special enemies that are harder to kill and deal more damage to players.
- Blood splatters, spray and basic dismemberment of enemies.
- Different impact effects depending on which type of surface is being shot at.
- All features implemented so far are replicated for multiplayer gameplay.
- User settings for graphics and audio.
- Many more smaller features!
Developing with Unreal Engine 5
The game is being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Getting to grips with this powerful software has been a steep learning curve, but a very rewarding experience. The plethora of tutorials available on sites like YouTube has been extremely helpful, and I must give credit where credit is due for the creators who have been able to share their knowledge in a clear and engaging way.
These creators in particular have been of huge help, and I would thoroughly recommend them if you are keen to learn UE5:
A particular challenge for this game has been learning the concepts of replication for multiplayer gameplay. I will dive into more detail about this in future devlogs.