Fueled By Rage

An Unreal Project created for District Jam V

Fueled by Rage was my first game in Unreal and was created in August 2024 for District Jam V. The theme for this Jam was "Sizzle" so I used the definition "to seethe with deep anger or resentment" and created this fun destructive game. 

My Role and What I Learned

This project was a bit daunting as although the Jam spanned across two weekends one of those weekends and the week between them happened to be my move-in week for the Fall Semester. I chose to work on this project solo so I could teach myself Unreal but this meant I had roughly three days to assemble my first-ever Unreal Engine game. I had wanted to learn Unreal for a while but my only experience before this was maybe three hours of a tutorial that mainly discussed materials and lighting. I am very proud of this game considering its circumstances and think it's a bit of genuine fun (even if it's only for a few minutes).

 I loved using Unreal. I can see how it is pretty complex for a first game engine but man does it ever make up for that with its power. For 3D games Unreal is almost certainly my new favorite engine to work with. The lighting and graphics look great with almost no effort at all and the blueprint system is a huge time saver. I followed a tutorial for the basic movement and animations but I figured out how to add colliders to the hands and feet and added some sound effects almost entirely on my own. I am a perfectly proficient programmer using Unity and C# but the blueprint system allows me to work so much faster and more efficiently. Instead of typing out large blocks of code I just add a few nodes, connect them, and boom working code. 

The biggest misstep I took was when creating the furniture not creating a parent blueprint for all the furniture before I created my scene. This made it a lot more tedious to then create blueprints for the various types of furniture for their sound effects. I'm certain there is a way to create a parent blueprint after the fact however I was fairly close to the deadline and decided to just recreate the furniture blueprints and place them back into the scene. 

Overall I considered this game a great success as it taught me the fundamentals of Unreal, boosted my confidence in the engine, and is a game I am proud of.