Featured image: Screenshot from my 3D shooter game. The player can board and control airplanes to facilitate their escape from a robot apocalypse (if it ever happens, at least you’ll get some practice!)

Back in 2021, I developed a combat-themed 3D first-person shooter game with Unreal Engine 4. On your quest to escape from the robot apocalypse, you need to overcome hostile characters (pictured below). You’ll have to navigate through robot-infested forests and ancient cities, armed with your dexterity and whatever abandoned resources (aircraft and road transportation) you can scavenge.

I chose Unreal Engine as my preferred game development engine because of its versatile 3D editor and user-friendly programming. The code aspects are handled completely by a block-based interface that’s reminiscent of Scratch, but much more powerful.

I began developing the game with no specific purpose other than to practice my game creation skills; the project started as an experiment with aircraft player controls, but the salient features of the game, including the NPCs’ behaviour and combat, quickly grew out of this idea.

The appearance and sounds of the characters and scenery were mainly borrowed from the Unreal Engine development community. Most of the time I spent—which amounted to a couple of weeks in the summer before grade 8—was with exploring scene appearances and programming the characters’ AI behaviour and combat mechanics.

I ultimately shelved the project at the end of that summer because its growing complexity, even with only two levels, began to overcome my computer’s resources. I compiled the project for Windows, and if you want to try the game for yourself, it’s HERE*. Beware of the very large download size and in-game latency: that’s because I was playing around with content packages and it went out of hand!

I’ve recently been returning to the project to patch up bugs in the gameplay and increase its modularity. Hopefully, I’ll find time to fix all the fluff that’s inflating the file size and find a solution to reduce the lag. If nothing else, I hope this project will be a demonstration of how easy it is to get started on a complex-looking game, as well as a reminder of the importance of programming best practices!

*Compiled for Windows only (Mac version coming soon). File size is 6.49 GB. Once download is complete, unzip the file and navigate to WindowsNoEditor\Aliens.exe.