UE5 Development: Future-Proofing Design
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Engine Used in Development: Unreal Engine 5.7
My Role(s): Lead System & Experience Designer
Team Size: 3
Previous Work : The Rookies
The VR Journalist Experience
Neighborhood Watch VR
Milestone I – Deployment & Early Systems
During the first milestone, one of the things the team wanted to tackle was the basic systems used to underline the fulfilling player experience. Neighborhood Watch places you, the estranged and disgraced journalist, in a position where you’re doing whatever it takes to get your next big piece. As you were job hunting, you came across a newsletter that caught your attention. “Possible extraterrestrials hiding in our city! Attention!” Equipped with nothing but your camera and your wits, you must navigate through the night to capture the residents of your neighborhood. But, be careful, as some of them aren’t what they seem…
My specific role for this team was working on the player/user experience, XR, and feedback tailored to world-space systems work. This included the main system, our camera and event system, which was reworked from the ground up in regards to our previous 4-week excursion where we tackled the first prototype for this project. During that time, my knowledge of Unreal was relatively bare, so the prototype came out usable, but not to a state that I was satisfied with.
From a multi-calculated photograph scoring system to a dynamic event system (scalable to the needs of the experience), the player will interact with all of these seamlessly to tie together the core loop. It was during this experience that I also put together a compilation of the work I’ve been learning while exploring Unreal Engine 5, the engine of choice for this work.
Another system that I began working on at this time was our inventory system. Every good journalist needs their black-top fedora to make themselves a real reporter, and as a team, we decided we’d take this feature to the next level to allow for the player to store their photographs inside. In this current iteration, the photographs stick to the hat and are set to be visible/invisible depending on the hat state (on/off). This hat also functions as our scene-switching save system, as it stores all the values from the photos in a struct that can then be pulled at a later state.
Lorem Ipsum…
