Escape From the Wizard's Crypt

About this Project:
In this short game-ette, you are being held prisoner in the crypt of an evil wizard. One day after waking you find that your cell door has been left open and decide to make your escape. You must use your fire magic to defeat all of the undead minions or else find yourself locked in your cell again...or worse. (Tip...try to break the barrels!)

This project is an upgrade of my first C++ game project from school (original link below). It was made in Unreal Engine 5.1 using both Blueprints and C++ and a variety of assets from the Unreal Marketplace. My goal was to use more of the techniques and programming knowledge I acquired  in order to turn it into something I feel more proud to share. I don't consider it to be finished at this time - though I have moved on to other projects for now.

In addition to swapping to a more realistic asset pack for the environment and improving other visual effects, the entire level was re-designed in order to better make use of the improved item carrying mechanic. In my original project, carrying items doesn't have much real gameplay purpose - it was just something I added while practicing line traces. Now, in order to progress through the level the player needs to find special statues and bring them to particular alcoves to reveal new passages forward or drop potions into magic fountains to get clues. The item carrying system itself was much improved by using Unreal's built-in Physics Handle which I hadn't learned about yet when first making this project.

Improvements were made to the enemy AI by incorporating Behavior Trees and gameplay was expanded to include two enemy types instead of one - a stationary guard type and one that will chase after the player when they are sighted. Other additions to the gameplay in the updated version include destructible barrels and a loot component (added to the enemies and the barrels) that would choose a random item to drop from an array. New components for health and mana were also added to help clean up and optimize the code as each component only had to be created once instead of having the same code repeating in different files but they could be easily added to the player, enemies, destroyable objects and anything else I need to have health or mana.

Link to video/images of the original project I made for class: https://www.behance.net/gallery/164351579/Wizards-Cave

Main Game Mechanics:
- Magical first-person shooter gameplay with 2 types of enemy AI behavior
- Pick-up and carry useful items
- Destroy environmental objects for additional recovery items
- Use magic fountains to spy on different areas of the crypt

Git: https://github.com/mpvan/WizardCaveV2