Portfolio by Ben Sadler

The Lone Marauder is a pirate-themed Android game developed using Unreal Engine. A pirate has been falsely accused by his former crew of stealing the captain's specialized rum. After being thrown overboard for these calumnies, he finds himself washed up on a remote island. Filled with rage and vengeance, he begins his adventure stripped with no belongings, no idea where he is and no one to help. He must fend for himself by taking over islands, gathering loot and getting revenge by taking out his former crew members.

There have been multiple programs used throughout the development The Lone Marauder. The programs used are -

• Unreal Engine 4 - Game Engine
• Photoshop - For images and item thumbnails
• Audacity - Editing sound effects
• OBS - Video Recording
• Mixamo - Animations

Unreal Engine

The Lone Marauder was developed mainly using Unreal Engine. By utilising the Visual Scripting element of Unreal Engine, I was able to develop the game in a fast and efficient manner. I have also utilised useful plugins and assets to help with the development

Visual Scripting

The Visual Scripting element in Unreal Engine is extremely useful for new developers and also useful for efficient development.

As a passionate developer having clean, optimized code is important to me for streamlining the development process and allowing the program to run as optimally as possible. Below is a screenshot of an example where I utilised functions to prevent repetitive code.

As you can see, whenever the player touches the attack button, the attack event is fired. The first check is to see wether the player CAN attack, and if they can, we fire the Attack function - which cycles through the combo counter that the player is on and uses the correct attack

By utilising events and functions like the example above, I have streamlined the development process and removed any redundant or repetitive programming, allowing for faster and more efficient development

Mixamo

Mixamo is a website by Adobe that allows users to download animations that are auto targeted to a user uploaded model (FBX). I have used this website for all my animations in The Lone Marauder, which allowed me to focus my time on game features as I have only had a few months to develop the game.

The models and assets I have used have been obtained from Synty Studios. These models have unique skeleton bone rigging that are not compatible with Mixamo's auto targeting function. Therefore, I was able to use a plug named Mixamo Animation Re-targeting to re-target these animations automatically to my models.

Below are screenshots of The Lone Marauder