Samurai Feuds
Samurai Feuds is a tug of war game made in Unreal Engine 4. Set in feudal Japan, two groups of villagers battle it out as they progress through technology and train Samurai! This is a personal project that helped fill a gap in my knowledge of both C++ and Unreal Engine 4.
Samurai Feuds was the second project completed after finishing my Master’s course. The intention behind the project was to put what skills I had learnt from creating Syndicate Defence to creating a small, polished game in less time. Inspired by an old flash game called Age of War I tasked myself to create something similar with a feudal Japanese theme. Total development time of this project was 3 months.
The focus of the game is to manage your resources in a way that you are simultaneously able to send out units and defend your castle. Because of this, the combat system was designed to be simple. By laying units out in single file and only allowing the front units to attack. This created a queuing system that meant the opposing team had to wade through all units before attacking the castle.
To allow for some diversity in combat, three archetypes of units were created which evolved around their weapon: Dagger, Sword and Spear/Polearm. These archetypes were spread out over 5 groups of units which were the defined by the military expertise of the character model: Villager, Sensei, Ninja, Warrior and Samurai. Each group had two archetypes assigned to them, mixing it up each group to not seem repetitive.
Learning from Syndicate Defence, a lot more time was devoted to getting the UI set up and properly working. One of the key things I learnt, is that UI is not as simple as it seems especially coming from a Unity background. The solution used here was making each UI a separate blueprint that was then referenced in a manager blueprint for all UI. From here I got all the relevant references to turn correct elements on and off and not encounter any layering issues. The drawback is that it can look like a huge mess, but actually gets the results wanted.
The final feature worked on was a unique feature I wanted to add to mix things up a bit. I created a ‘all or nothing’ unit. The idea of this unit, is that when you are stuck in the endgame and constantly going backwards and forwards without making any progress you can gamble to see if you win. This unit was far stronger and far more powerful than any other unit, but the catch is if he dies, you lose! I named this unit appropriately ‘Shogun’.