Last December 10, 2018, I was one of the attendees who attended the free Masterclass for Unreal Engine (the software we use for our ‘Crop Circle Warriors’ mobile game) at the College of St. Benilde. The said class was from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. The master class was held by Chris Murphy, an evangelist for Epic Games and founder of Pub Games with over 10 years of experience with Unreal Engine.
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Introductory Lessons on Unreal Engine
Project setup
Controller setup
Importing assets
Building materials
Creating character classes
Creating AI
Navigation
Blending animation
Spawning enemies
Maintaining game state and configuring in-game UI
Design principles
Blueprint debugging and performance optimization techniques.
All these techniques were used in our mobile game already.
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Advanced Technical Art
Landscapes
Procedural foliage
Procedural spline tools
Particle effects
GPU particle effects
Material tesselation
material masking
world position effects
Screen space particle effects
Volumetric fog
The introductory lessons covered all the basics that are needed to create a simple 3D character that moves and followed by enemies in a small level. He taught us how to import animation assets, blending separate animations to create a new animation, create a basic state machine which dictates what animation will play depending on what button is pressed e.g. move forward, move backward, jump etc. All these techniques were used in our game already.
After the basics, we moved to the advanced part of the class which is technical art that covers shaders, visual effects, level creation tools like the use of spline to procedurally generate landscape paths and procedurally generate foliage. He also taught us the landscape tools and how to sculpt hills and cliffs.
The discussion on Landscapes, Procedural foilage (creating 3D plants easily), world position offset effects (how to manipulate objects in the overall landscape), volumetric fog (realistic fog that adapts to lights), were new to me and this knowledge can help us make our games much better. I will apply the new techniques I learned to the Crop Circle Warriors mobile game.
Unfortunately, I was not able to ask the questions I needed to ask due to the many participants in the auditorium who also had questions and took pictures with Mr. Murphy. Due to the same reason, I was not able to show the sample of our mobile to discuss the problems that I cannot solve by myself. They said they will be scheduling another Unreal Master Class soon, so maybe we will have another opportunity to show our game.
Words by: Jap Tolentino
Pictures from IGMA
Miracle Animation Studios Inc. 
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