Shinrin: Tactical Turn Based Combat

I decided to do a little write up on this project because even though it has been dormant for the last few years, it's still an interesting showcase of my experience with UE4 Blueprints and C++.

Everyone has these passion projects, Project Shinrin was mine. It's supposed to be a tactical turn based rpg with an Total war-like world map and XCOM-like combat. But we're not here to talk about game design.

If you want the tl;dr version, this video below was the last one I uploaded. It showcased how my system was relatively well implemented since I could make two AI teams battle each other without much alteration in the code.

Here is the playlist with all the videos I uploaded:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGAKcxMWqHiE4mDnQ9Hyv7N7h15q3t4Ho

When I started out I researched different pathfinding techniques like A* or Dijkstra. Which was very interesting and I remember having a lot of fun with these. I made everything in blueprints at this point.

I just added and changed stuff as I liked without really focusing on getting a prototype completed. Like for example a map editor. Which was totally not needed at this point. But the idea intrigued me.(See playlist)

After I began to run into performance issues I started to rewrite almost everything from scratch and the interesting part is that I moved all my base classes and the more heavier functions (like pathfinding) to C++. Which was a huge performance help.

Ultimately, the obstacle that made me stop working on it was a good Ability framework. While most things worked okay-ish, the one part that was still very ugly coded was the combat/action phase. I was trying to find a way to create a solid framework for it, so I didn't have to rewrite everything 5 times. In the end I never got this to work and I think I also managed to break some stuff after trying to implement Unreal own Abilities system in my project.

Whenever I have a better grasp on queues, tasks and latent functions I might return to this problem.

I hope I can work on this or something similar again in the future.