Contra X8 Collaboration

Hello again! I have been MIA the past year and that is because I have been working full-time for a hero shooter called X8, which you can think of as a VR take on Valorant!

I had the pleasure to work on an exciting collaboration with Konami for one of their classic NES games called Contra (which if you're an oldhead, you may have heard of!).

I worked on the User Interface and AI systems within the game. One of the things I had to make was a "pressure system" which enabled the enemies to choose between one player or the other. Through this, I learned about the following:

In order to use the system, we had to link the blueprint services to C++ nodes with names identifying the services. For instance, we had "Find All Alive Contra Players" which would look into the GameState and find all the team states associated with it and assign a pressure value to a player using the Gameplay Ability System (GAS). So if one player has a lower pressure system, a new enemy spawned would look at the new player. There is one character that has an "effective" character too called Charade! In this case the AI would target the clone decoy, serving as an effective distraction for approximately 10 seconds! That means the pressure target system remembers this "cached" player and acts upon it. When finished, it will return to selecting the other available players.

In addition, I adjusted the movement component values with data tables, which are extremely invaluable in Unreal Engine.

I had never worked with AI directly in Unreal Engine before this project, so it was an amazing experience! We did so much in a little more than 3 months of working on this project.

This is the experience if you are interested in checking it out:

UPDATE: 3/13 - The game has been taken off the platform. I updated the link to the game X8 instead and a news article about super storm. X8 Meta/Steam game Contra super storm article

Meanwhile, I am learning some new features in Unreal Engine 5. Stay tuned on my blog for updates on that.