Night Is Coming
This was an entry for the Game Developers' Guild Inaugural Jam and was completed in 72 Hours on the Weekend of May 29th, 2020. This project is built entirely in Unreal Engine 4 with the blueprints system. The theme for this jam was Night is Coming. This game is a simple tower defense where you gather resources during the day and defend yourself through the night. As the nights progress the enemies become more numerous and more difficult to fend off. The game currently ends once you are overrun, which then it will display the number of days you survived and how many enemies you killed.
One of the most interesting parts of working on this project was the selection highlight as that was done almost entirely in a post process shader. The game first will flag an item either via the mouse or camera to be drawn with custom depth. This allows the post process shader to see the object and it then draws the blue outline by sampling all nearby pixels to detect when it is on the edge of the object. Now when the user actually selects an object the game changes the stencil value from 0 to 255 which is used to determine the color of the outline shown, in this case turning the outline to the dark orange outline.
This was the first time that I had used a more complex pathing AI in unreal using a navmesh to have the enemies path to buildings, while not always perfect with some enemies sometimes hanging on a space, it often worked well enough to get enemies to their intended destinations. The navmesh is also setup to recalculate itself throughout the game, this is so that it accounts for when new buildings are placed. If an enemy fails to path to their desired target they will instead try and target the nearest building and attempt to destroy it.