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Personal Projects
The Smoldering Coasts
RPG Setting
6/20 - Present
I've played RPGs, both digital and Pen and Paper, for most of my life. I've loved studying their systems, settings, and gameplay, which made me want to make my own setting. As such, I started making my setting, The Smoldering Coasts, for D&D 5th Edition.
There are a few main goals I have in mind for this setting.
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Player Stories - After playing lots of Dungeon World with my friends, I fell in love with this. It's not just the characters and their backstories that players can bring, but a little bit of information about the world itself. As such, I've provided a lot of detail about the different regions in the world, as well as the people living in it. However, I have left a lot of information about what these people are doing, leaving that open for the players to decide how their own version of The Smoldering Coasts is operating.
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New Technology - As much as I love classic fantasy, I also really love Steampunk. As such, Steampunk is a part of The Smoldering Coasts in the form of a steam-powered train system, airships, and some robots. Having some form of technology in a world of magic can lead to very interesting stories, and I want to provide a new setting where players can experience that.
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New Subclasses (and possibly new classes) - Dungeon World has some very fun abilities and systems that I would love to draw on and bring to a setting based in Dungeons & Dragons. The easiest way I see for this is new subclasses for existing classes.
Once I figured out my three main goals, I wanted to come up with a general setting structure. The structure I came up with was a land that had been ravaged by a long-passed calamity, but the scars are still there. Precious resources are scarce, and tensions between many nations are high. The idea was to make it specific enough that players can see this setting and understand whats going on, but be vague enough to allow players and storytellers make the world their own and not be too constrained.
Then I made a map, put a bunch of details on that map while considering the relationships between the countries, and then wrote a splatbook for people to peruse.
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I currently have some basic concepts for the subclasses and how they fit within the setting to help bring the world to life, but I don't have anything definitive at the moment in that.
Into the Dreadnaught
UE4 Learning Exercise and Game Project
8/21 - Present
I started this game project as a way for me to learn UE4 and Blueprints while having goals that I could work towards and track.
The concept is a loot shooter with guns that have randomized perks. Nothing overly complex, not too worried about balancing or anything since I am working on it completely solo and want to use this mostly as a learning experience for the engine, visual scripting, and how I can translate back and forth between written scripts and visual scripts easily depending on what I need to do at any given time.
From that concept I started making note of what systems I would need, and then figuring out subsystems that would be needed to support them. For example, I would need different types of guns. To make it easier to make guns, I can utilize inheritance. My gun system has a baseline parent gun, which has the main functions that almost all guns will need. It can aim, it can shoot, and it can reload.
From this, I made numerous gun archetypes that inherit from this parent gun. There is a pulse rifle, an auto rifle, a shotgun, and a charge gun. These different gun types cover their shooting patterns, calling upon the parent gun for its base functions when they need to an expanding with their own specific code. From these new archetypes I can make all the more specific guns I can want, including any specific special effects each individual gun may have. This system makes it easy to develop new weapons on the fly, adding and changing bits with different guns with very little additional overhead per weapon.
As for the perks, I decided the most flexible and easy way to do it was to make every perk a separate component that could be added to the gun actor after the fact via blueprints. As such, the system I made splits perks into three classifications: damage, defense, and utility. This allows me to have more control over the perk balance of weapons by changing the number of perks they have, as well as the number of which type of perks they have.
Each gun has a list for each classification of perk, each of which contain the names of perks it is allowed to have. It randomly selects from these lists based on the number of perks the gun has, and then sends that off to the player perk manager. From there, the perk manager finds the perk by name in its matching class-divided structs and then adds the matching perk component back to the gun. I have commented screenshots of this whole process in my code section, found here:
https://jeffagrow.wixsite.com/jeffgrow/blueprint-samples
I don't know if I am going to go on to make it a full fledged game, seeing as I am working on it completely by myself. But I do intend to keep working on it and adding things to help myself learn the UE4 engine and try out design concepts for abilities in this game genre space.
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