I added in rain and some mood lighting. There were also a bunch of other smaller changes but this is where I’m at.

It’s very dark and the rain kinda looks like pills falling so I’ll probably need to do another pass here. I’m happy with the water material I setup here:

Essentially its just a blue matte material with a sphere mask. The sphere mask just tells unreal what to make translucent instead of blue. Going back to my last game post (the one about how compiling materials is horrible). I made a generic rain material instance where I parameterized the rain settings:

Which it’s not crazy impressive but I used to modify the material directly so I’m happy with my personal progress here. I also started making a larger landscape for game and I think I have a better idea of how I want a real level to be shaped.

The rain itself is attached to the character. Which I honestly kinda hate, I could add another ray trace to check if the player is inside, but I’m trying to limit the amount of work I do in the tick functions.

I also moved the whole project up to unreal 5.6 from 5.3

This has a better setup for first person games where it renders the gun ontop of everything else so I don’t need to do as many weird tricks to make the gun not clip through walls.

Example:

Finally I added a zoom with right click:

I’m leaning towards making larger maps so I wanted to add in things to facilitate that. Currently my focus is on making said “Larger Map” which I think might take the majority of my time from the game here. The only thing that might be required to make a map like that work is a vehicle system, which I think shouldn’t be horrible to make as unreal has a bunch of templates for that. The map itself however I can see easily making the game zero fun, so my primary goal is to really just start pumping out levels to see what works.