For the last little while I’ve been teaching myself Unreal Engine. Recently, Epic Games made it completely free to use for anyone, which I think is an absolutely amazing idea. It could possibly be fundamental for pushing video games even further by getting future developers hooked.

Since I’m learning from the ground up, I wanted to create an MMO-style control system, using the blueprint system, based on the third person template available. Control systems are pretty fundamental in video games, and I have some very specific memories of completely giving up on well known titles because of bad input design.

NOTE: This isn’t actually for an online game – this just mimics the controller functionality.

I’ve picked an MMO-style controller because I think they are an interesting system – you can interact with the UI and the game world using the mouse, set your camera orientation to a preferred direction, and with position based combat or other position based game features, you can create many layers of complex interaction that players can get very, very good at.

The difficulties I face as a newer user to Unreal Engine, are that I’m not very good at animation nor artwork, and I’m not aware of everything Unreal Engine offers, or “best practices” for implementing a feature. There is some obvious room for improvement, which I will outline, but will require some further research on my part. Hopefully I can fix things up in the future to add some polish to this project.

This mini-series will be fairly long and detailed, so I will split it up over several posts, and cross link things.

Contents

Links will be updated as the posts go live.

• Overview
• Blueprint settings, input actions and axes
• Camera zoom with the mouse wheel
• Character Movement
• Character Rotation
• Orient Character to Movement Direction
• Click and drag camera control
• Future improvements