Fighting Game in Unreal Engine
Summary
Fighting Game moveset implemented into Unreal Engine 5
Specifications
4+3 weeks 50%
Unreal Engine 5.3.2
Autodesk Maya
Goal
For this project I wanted to polish and reanimate animations I had made in a previous course and implement them into Unreal.
I felt very inspired by games like Guilty Gear while making this and tried to maintain the snappiness of their animations, but have it remain my style.
Process
Making the animations for this project was a ton of fun.
At first I made the animations too slow, the attacks had too much time until the attack actually hit. The game was missing that snappiness and reactive feel, so I changed the animations to have faster startups.
Having less time before the animation means less time for anticipation. Which leads me to the next part.
While making the attack animations I focused a lot on what happens before the hit, I didn’t really think about the part where the character returns to their original stance. Having the character snap into place like this looked Ugly. Once I realized that I overhauled almost all of the attack animations to have a better transition back to Idle-Pose.
Because of this I realized that for these types of games, the animation that plays after the hit is just as important as the one that plays before.
Before
After
BluePrints
I began my blueprints by making sure the player could move around the world.
I then began making the jump function. This was difficult because I wanted to use root motion for my jumps.
I fixed the error by making the player switch movement mode to flying while the jump is active, and then switch back once the jump is over.
There after I made the attacks in the blueprints.
most of the are very similar, with only small functions separating them.
Some of the attacks needed extra care to function correctly, like “Light Attack”, which functions differently if you stand still, crouch or jump.
Using montage notifications to make sure animations couldn’t cancel eachother was key to make the game play well.
During this project I used Animation montages to play every animation how I wanted it to be played. Dividing the animation into two parts right when the attack hits.
And I used A LOT of montages
VFX
Special thanks to Åke Sjögren for using my character in their VFX project!
I wanted to add these VFX to the project but I realized that spending more time polishing the animations would be the best thing to do.