The Mannequin Factory

Over the last couple months I’ve been focusing on learning Unreal Engine 4. Epic has a pretty nice suite of resources of their own, and through them I started working on a new project that I’m calling The Mannequin Factory for right now. I’m attempting to constrain myself by using only Epic’s starter content as assets - all the character models will just be the basic UE4 Mannequin that they use in all their demo projects, and I’m planning to use only their starter materials. It’s a fairly tight set of constraints and I don’t expect to have something especially pretty, but I’m hoping that I can make something that manages to look cool thanks to lighting and maybe some unusual design choices here and there.

Mannequin Factory is a third person shooter that takes locomotion inspiration from Remedy’s Control. The player can dash like the player character in Control and has pretty fast movement speed. There is cover in the game but my intention is that it’s more for the AI than for the player.

One of my goals is to portray this factory as decrepit, and as though there have been other escape attempts. I plan to use the player character model as props throughout the levels, showing others who have failed to escape. Lights in the factory flicker, the lighting is dim, and there are broken pieces of infrastructure, occasionally requiring platforming skill to traverse.

As for combat, I want to give players a feeling of speed. So far I don’t have hitscan weapons in the game, all the guns fire lasers that move through the world and test if they hit their target. With the player’s speed and their ability to dash I want dodging and weaving through gunfire to be a core part of the gameplay. For now the player’s weapons operate on a heat system, where firing them builds up heat that is dissipated naturally over time. If the heat bar fills up completely the player is unable to fire the weapon until the heat has entirely dissipated.

This video showcases kind of a first draft of the first level. I wanted to get a combat arena in to see how the AI does (less than ideal) and whether I could accomplish the look I want. I feel pretty good about the look, considering how blocky it is.

The base UE4 mannequin is something everyone who opens the editor is going to look at at some point. It’s cold and stark, and so are a lot of the starter content assets. I think there’s something interesting to be done with this stuff, and I hope I can make it happen.

I’m currently working on the remainder of this level, but I am still in the brushes stage and since UE4 brushes are weird, my projectiles pass straight through them and there is no way to work around this. Once the level geometry is satisfactory I duplicate it and turn it all in to meshes so that I can actually set collision rules for it. I keep an old version though because hey, nothing’s ever done and I might want to fiddle with the level design. One day I’ll start using one of the third party tools that lets you edit static meshes inside UE4, but today’s not that day.