So I’ve been away for a few months now, and I feel its a good time to come back to the website and write a bit about my new project – Mech Defence.

New Beginnings

Let me begin by mentioning that the game has nothing to do with Mechs, although they were part of the initial idea which is why I settled on the working title “Mech Defence”. Had to call it something right? Though I do feel that I have this uncanny tendency to name things something they’re not, old habits die hard I suppose.

Okay, so its not about Mechs, then what is it about? the gist of it is to get your vehicle from a starting point within a given level to a designated ending point while waves of enemies attempt to destroy you and your vehicle. This mechanic borrows primarily from the Payload game mode in Team Fortress 2 with the difference being that Mech Defence will be single player and also the vehicle will have to be driven by the player in order to move it. There are several other mechanics as well which I will get to in future devblogs as I develop the game further.

Unlike my previous endeavors, this time I’m using the Unreal Engine to develop the game. I wanted to focus on developing a game as a whole which involves dabbling in multiple disciplines like game design, 3d modelling, animation, user interface development, sound design as well as a myriad of others alonside programming which I’m already familiar with.

Snapshots from development showing behaviour trees used for artificial intelligence and vehicle debug visualization

So far my experience transitioning from custom engines to unreal has been pretty good. However, I must admit the initial learning curve for getting up to speed with the basic concepts used in unreal is quite steep when compared to something like Unity. It really does make the experience more worthwhile though as unreal comes with so much builtin including a complete gameplay framework. It even deals with the minutia of applying damage to different entities which felt simultaneously welcome and bizzare to someone used to rolling everyting on their own. The flipside to all this is of course, eventually you outgrow whatever framework you begin with and it remains to be seen what the experience is like when the proverbial training wheels need to come off.

A long road ahead...

There’s a lot more to talk about and I don’t really have too much set in stone at the moment but I have enough to start and I trust the process to reveal the rest as I develop further. I’m really excited about where I’ll end up with this project. Lets see where this road goes!