Slide Grind
Slide Grind is a UEFN project centered around making a unoffical sliding tutorial in a quick time span to improve on iteration skills.
Project length = 4 weeks
Behind The Scenes
Slide Grind is a sliding tutorial set within UEFN, tasking the player from sliding from the top of the spiral to the bottom islands as an interactive way of learning similar to industry type games. Early designs involved having a “island based system” where each island consists of its own challenges that gradually increase in difficulty. These islands slowly teaches the player the basis of movement, parkour and sliding with later challenges sharing similarities to the current in game meta to be a more accurate tutorial.
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The beginning segments would instruct the player on the controls before some light challenges, once arriving to the middle factory area, players have to use weaponry to defeat traps whilst navigating over obstacles, which acts as a break from sliding to better reinforce the mechanic.
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Later “gauntlet” areas feature a more heavy focus on parkour, with reaction challenges, optional areas and a combination of all mechanics so far to thoroughly teach the player sliding.
Annotations
Beatmap
Checkpoints
Parkour segments
Environmental Design
Slides
Pacing
MRT
Showcase Gif
Background research
Background research that went into the designs formed the basis for the tutorial. Verticality was inspired from the likes of dishonoured and its air assassination DLC’s. Apex legends focus on momentum based movement and logical sliding created the ramps and ramp based challenges. Titanfall 2 inspired the end “gauntlet” task of throwing all the taught mechanics at the player to cement a core gameplay loop. Lastly, vanquish was used to pace the tutorial as well as take more generic tutorial elements to be used within gunplay and parkour elements.
Dishonored
Titanfall 2
Apex Legends
Vanquish
Final Renders
Using UEFN was almost identical to using UE5 apart from slight differences in level design workflow. Because maps submitted must be uploaded to the cloud, each map has a restricted file size that increases when using “devices” which a substitute for blueprints. This proved to be a slight hindrance as meshes also affected the scale but not enough to drastically affect the level.
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Main gameplay elements such as weapon spawners, checkpoints, traps and destructible props were all setup using these devices, which is a nice tool to work with for level designers as these are accessible and require less technical knowledge compared to blueprints. The downside to this is that not optimising where these devices are used throughout the level, or how man are used, bloats the file size which can be a large issue for bigger projects.
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Meshes were the easiest part as apart from large collection and folder scrapping, these proved to be well optimised and allowed the creativeness of each island to shine through with different scales, themes and colour usage. This also goes for particles such as the thunderstorm above the level and floating particles underneath select islands that explains visually how the level exists within the world.
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Some issues that plagued development were difficulties with correct player spawning as spawning in an editor environment can lead to spawning at 0,0,0 on all axis. Another issue is how LOD’s on models abruptly cut in and out across the level due to the scale of the map. This was fixed by cleverly blocking sightlines and having “observation points” which are more open areas that don’t have LOD issues.
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The main issue with UEFN to consider with further development is how destructible props have to have devices assigned to them which makes full destructible playgrounds impossible. The devices that are used to give destruction also do not play nice with ramps, or floating props that aren’t attached to other islands.
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Overall for first time usage of UEFN, the level turned out well and effectively taught players core gameplay mechanics with iterations to bug fixes, spawns/item placements and pacing.
Skills Learnt
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Improving iteration skills and acting on feedback
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Differences in Unreal Engine for Fortnite compared to regular Unreal Engine
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Improving designs by taking direct influence from research and thinking about other aspects of the level such as mechanics working together and environments
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Usage of branches and pull requests within unreal's source control across multiple machines
Skills Used
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Photoshop
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Unreal Engine for Fortnite
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Unreal's Source control