Deskbot Assembly Station

Inspiration

Inspiration for this project came from a robot builder, Valve's Aperture Desk job game, and the theme of Hack the Future.

What it does

This game allows players to interact with the objects in their environment to cause carts to move. Initially, we wanted to build out a robot builder game and obstacle course but ran out of time so we used carts as a way to prototype adding items to a robot and it doing something once the conditions are met. This game also features a dynamic asteroid belt Justin created that orbits the planet.

How we built it

This game was built using Unreal Engine 5's blueprint, and Niagara systems. As for the game demo page, it was built using React.js and deployed to Netlify.

We spent quite a bit of time setting everything up and compiling assets on the first day. Then on Saturday, Damon built out the level, the team collaborated on the game blueprints to grab objects and cause the carts to move, Srihan created the website, and Justin built out the asteroid system.

The assets we used in this game are part of Epic Game Store's forever free assets and Quixel Bridge Megascans

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into included:

Working collaboratively on an Unreal Project
Installing Unreal
We lost one teammate
Wasted a lot of time on the robot meshes we initially wanted to use for the builder to find out they were not created properly for our use case
Compatibility between different devices, small differences between MacOS and Windows when trying to set up Unreal Engine.
Being able to export in an unexpected file format.
Working in different time zones, our schedules were a bit off in the mornings and evenings.
The navigation bar did not scale correctly on different sizes and the buttons were not perfectly centered how I envisioned it. I also had troubles with the GitHub repositories and deploying the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built out this game and website in a day's time. So, while it is not exactly what we initially wanted to complete we were able to finish something that could easily be built upon with only three people.

What we learned

Damon: I learned that it is really hard to manage a team on an Unreal Engine code base, and had a chance to mess with the explosion/chaos system in Unreal.

Justin: 1) Gained an understanding of the fundamentals of Unreal Engine 2) Gained familiarity with Blueprints in Unreal Engine, as well as some of the complex animations the software can create. 3) Learned about the Unreal Engine community and the vast number of resources available to people interested in using the software to build a game.

Srihan: I learned a lot about how organization and optimization. My folder structure was clear and concise for me and I plan to use this type of folder structure later on in my future projects.

What's next for Deskbot Assembly Station

Transfer from carts to actual robots. May need to create some 3D models so we can have modular robots that can be easily pieced together. Also, build out an obstacle course for the robots so that once you build them you can go and test them out.