The Last Line

The Last Line sees the player as the leader of a small force of guards fending off invaders.  The player has a small element of control over their allies, noted by green health bars, with the command ability.  By pressing E, the player can command nearby allies to move to the position the player is facing.  Allies will stop to fight enemies that are too close on the way.

This project was made as part of the 3 day MiniJam 110: Sacrifice.  The limitation was "Failure Is Inevitable."  The idea is that the player must sacrifice themselves and their comrades in this fight.  Failure is inevitable because the game is endless.  The idea is that the player is buying time for townspeople to escape.  Originally, I wanted to have a civilian AI escaping towards the back of the map, but there just was not enough time.

The project was done using C++ and Unreal Engine as well as Unreal Engine's blueprint system in a few places.  This was my first project in Unreal without directly following a tutorial.  Personally, I think it came out well.  Obviously, some things took me a long time to do.  Creating and retargeting the IK Rigs of the animations skeletons to the skeletons of the models I wanted to use took over 4 hours.  I barely wrote any code on the first day because I was finding assets, setting up animation blueprints, and other such tasks.  There were also some cut features as mentioned with the civilian AI because of my unfamiliarity with certain aspects of the engine.  There are some elements of an unfinished crossbow weapon in the project, for example because I started it an optimistic 2 hours before the end of the jam.  other cut content includes a larger sound system, blocking, and a rallying ability to draw allies to the player.  Even so, I enjoyed this project thoroughly.

I did not make any of the assets such as sounds, models, and animations (I did not have time).  I did make the animation blueprints, blendspaces, IK_Retargeters, and other related items, but the actual models and animations are not mine.  All of the code and blueprints are mine.