WanderStar
Game Systems Senior Thesis
Released May 4th, 2024
Solo Project, Unreal Engine 5
Play it here on itch.io!
Navigate through the celestial realms in the 3D platformer WanderStar! Use the unique abilities of Cres and Sol to traverse the dangerous world by hooking, jumping, dashing, and gliding around to collect the stardust and help your new friend LG find his way home.
For my senior thesis project, I wanted to explore Unreal Engine 5's ability to handle games with 2D components, combining the flipbook-style games of my childhood like Super Paper Mario and my love for 3D character platformers such as Super Mario Galaxy and Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. I pulled characters from my recent Concept Art for Games project, where I designed three space-based characters to study the character design process.
In the world of the celestial beings, the day, night, and sky realms exist in harmony. When a blackhole attack happens during the annual Great Star Migration, one of the stars is knocked out of orbit. It is up to you to gather all the stardust using the characters' various abilities all while keeping each other safe.
GAMEPLAY/CODING
Semester 1 of this project focused entirely on coding game mechanics and gameplay design. All blueprints in the game were implemented and modified as needed through watching tutorials. The game's concept was modified from a previous project based on character design, which can be viewed here. The PaperZD plugin is used to modify flipbook animations using Unreal Engine's state machines for blueprints.
Features: 2D Flipbook Characters, 3D environment, multi-character gameplay, instant character switching, platforming
ART
The second half of this project focused on art asset implementation and bug fixing. I animated the characters using a paper-doll animation technique of cutting a main character sprite into movable pieces, which were manipulated in Blender, then rendered/sorted into a sprite sheet for Unreal Engine's Paper2D flipbook systems.
