For another university assignment, I was tasked to create a mobile game using Unreal Engine 4. The game concept could be anything, but it couldn’t be a first-person game or a shooter. I came up with the idea of a top-down maze game where the player must collect keys in order to escape at the exit.
The maze is extremely dark and filled with malevolent statues which creep up on the player when the player is not looking. The player has a torch which often is the only source of illumination.
Right after the concept stage I was faced with a problem: UE4’s mobile rendering pipeline does not allow for dynamic lights. This meant that the torch idea, a core game mechanic, was in trouble. I solved this problem with the use of custom materials (shaders) which modify the emissive colour based on the position of the camera. The results were quite pleasing, although dynamic shadows had to be dropped from the plan. I’m looking forward to an updated engine where dynamic lights in the mobile pipeline are possible!
Here’s a video trailer that I made for the game, running the UE4’s mobile previewer: -