Kepler was made with Unreal Engine 4 during the Spring of 2022. Players would explore through three different environments while collecting specimens for research. As they looped back around to their spaceship they would be chased by a monster.
This project was made for school, and my team and I had roughly the same amount of inexperience both in engine and coordinating a group project of this scale. Despite these obstacles we learned how to work together and pulled off a complete game by the end of the semester. This was my first experience making a game with a team and I thoroughly enjoyed the cooperative nature of it.
Outside of the work I put in to get the game functional, I made extra functionality for the monster. It would be able to track the player by “scent”; i.e., follow the player’s path. Players would drop points behind them which would form a network that the monster used to navigate. When the monster had line of sight on the player, it would charge them. Unfortunately, the scent mechanic wasn’t ever conveyed to the player which made encounters with it less tense then it could have been.
The level was a piece of the project we fumbled, it wasn’t started until halfway into the semester. I sketched some concepts for the environments and got started on the whitebox. I built it such that we could throw walls up and it would look complete, since at that point we were feeling the pressure of the deadline. The level ended up being one of the last things completed, and despite that it was fairly well put together.