Unreal Fellowship 2024: WaveDash!!

I was one of fifty participants chosen for the first Unreal Fellowship for Games in July 2024. Over the 4-week duration we learned the fundamentals of Unreal Engine 5, participated in scrums and group labs, and each built a game to be exhibited on arcade cabinets at UnrealFest Seattle in September 2024.

Our goal was to create an arcade-game experience of 5-10 minutes for one or two players, playable with one joystick and up to 6 buttons. My first thought for a modern arcade experience was Geometry Wars, and while its twin-stick input design was incompatible with a single-stick controller, it created the opportunity for a perfect twist: a cooperative game with one player driving and the other shooting.

Constraining gameplay to an arena meant I didn’t need to build out a level to traverse, but I still wanted gameplay to feel dynamic and fast-paced. Drawing from both classic shmups and animation (including Overwatch’s D.va cinematic), I decided to have the player racing across the open ocean. A moving water material, cloud and wind-line particle effects, and wakes below the player and enemies sold the effect (in the above video, there’s no gameplay difference from week 2 to 3, but the visuals dramatically change the game feel).

I confronted three major challenges while creating this game:

•  As the first iteration of the Epic Fellowship for Games, we were also a bit of a test run for the program. That meant some bumps in the road, but I also appreciated the opportunity to provide feedback for future iterations of what was ultimately a successful endeavor.
• Epic gave us a number of template games to edit or emulate. While I was thankful to have many elements already solved (UI, scoring, and object pooling in particular), I spent more time than I would have liked deconstructing the prebuilt blueprints to find the elements I needed to alter. In the end I had to cut stretch goals like more enemy types or additional visual juice like islands or ships.
• For ease of development, I initially implemented the game as single-player using one controller, and implementing Player 2 included two surprises that took me to the wire. First, implementing a single player character controlled by two input devices tested my understanding of Player Controllers and Pawns. And then packing the game for shipping taught me a valuable lesson about execution order, as a race condition prevented Player 2’s controller from being created.

With all challenges surmounted, the game debuted to great success at Unreal Fest 2024.