Mech Attack

Mech Attack is a third person shooter where the player controls a mech with a machine gun on the right side and a cannon on the left side.  The player also has a short range thermal vision at their disposal.  An onslaught of agents chases the player and shoots at them.  The player must survive as long as possible and defeat enemies.

Mech Attack was made as part of Mech Jam 3.  The period of the jam was 2 weeks, but I learned about the jam 4 days late and had a lot going on (for a week in the summer it was a lot at least) so I only had around 9 days off and on in total to devote to the game.  I found the mech model online, but decided to spend the first 4 days on learning rigging and animation in blender, both of which I did from scratch.  I spent another 2 days (with life getting in the way) trying to get the animations to work in UE5.  I was unfamiliar with importing animations and meshes and, as a result, I ran into a number of issues.  The legs imported at 1% of the size they were supposed to, for example.  I only got to code that was not related to mech animations when there were 4 days left.  Then I found out I would not be available on the last day so I only had 3 days to actually make the game.

I do not own the mech model, but I did make some small edits like changing the right gun to a smaller, triple-barreled machine gun.  I created the mech rigging, animations, and texture from scratch.   I do not own any of the other meshes or animations (except for the mesh I used for the health bar on the mech's back but a stretched octagon is not very notable).  The only sounds I made are the enemy hit sound and the mech walking sounds.  I made the step sound by heavily modifying the explosion sound effect I found.  The little hydraulic sound when the mech lifts its leg while walking is actually a recording of me humming with the pitch turned up.

In terms of code and blueprints, I followed tutorials and tweaked them around to fit my own preferences for the thermal vision (where I limited the range of the effect), muzzle flash particles, and health bar.  Everything else is my own work.

During this project, I gained a lot of experience working with Blender's rigging, animation, and texture painting systems.  I'm excited to work on modeling in the future, though that will be very time consuming.  I also learned a lot about materials, particles, and post processing during this project and really got lost playing around with all of them for a while.  I also got better at working with UE5's Behavior Tree system for the AI and coding my own decorators and tasks.  It still needs some work  While Mech Attack is not one of my most creative titles, the game still came out well in my opinion and I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.