Welcome back! If this is the first you’re hearing about this project, you can read more about the basic design premise of the game in my first Dev Log, linked here. While the main focus of this post will be to cover the Blueprints behind Feast’s Power-Ups, there were a few other areas that received attention recently, including:

• New Power-Ups

• Updated Enemy Models and Animations

• Basic Menus

• Refinement of the game’s core Blueprints

• The new Hunger mechanic, and

• A first look at Feast’s narrative!

I’ll be covering a handful of these areas in depth in the section below, but in case you’re more of a visual learner, here’s a short clip showing the current state of Feast’s prototype.

Updates

New Power-Ups

While Feast will ideally have a very wide variety of Power-Ups, right now I’ve predominantly been focused on what types of Power-Ups could be the bases for interesting gameplay down the line. One of the latest additions to Feast to embody this approach is “the Cleaver”, Feast’s first melee Power-Up!

The Cleaver serves as both a template for a broader class of melee Power-Ups, and the player’s current starting weapon. It’s relatively low damage and short range may not make it the most appealing choice to clear an entire level, but its simplicity and short cooldown means that players can jump right into the fray and defeat enemies that will give more impactful Power-Ups. And with the introduction of the new Hunger mechanic, players will have brand new reasons to be jumping into combat even more quickly.

Hunger

Feast is a game about using a ridiculous amount of Power-Ups to clear out levels full of a wide variety of enemies, and to do so at a fast pace. To keep players moving through levels and beating their foes, the Hunger mechanic has been added.

In addition to their health, players will now need to keep track of a steadily declining Hunger meter that can only be refilled by absorbing the Power-Ups that drop from defeated foes. When this meter reaches 0, players will regularly take damage until a new Power-Up is gained. Players will need to beat enemies and take their abilities for their own to beat the level before their Hunger eats them alive, figuring out the best way to get through a level swiftly with the Power-Ups at their disposal.

Narrative

While Feast has always had a lot of flavor attached to it, I wanted to spend a bit more time letting it cook before laying the details of its story out to bare. With that said, I’d still like to lay out the wider narrative premise before we get too deep into these dev logs, so let’s crack into it!

This is the basic premise of Feast, where you play as a vengeful computer virus destroying the legacy of the people who profited off it. There’s way more I could say about the wider narrative at play right now, but I need to keep some of it secret for the game itself!

Blueprints

Unreal 5’s Blueprints have been the backbone of Feast’s most important feature, its Power-Up. Through creating basic Actor Component templates with highly modular Blueprints, Feast’s Power-Up system can be versatile and varied while remaining fairly simple to set up. The larger “PowerUpEffect” template has several more specified child blueprints for particular kinds of Power-Ups, as seen below through the projectile focused “ShootBase” and the ray cast powered “LaserBase”. These in turn have their own children, customized to create specific new Power-Ups of the wider class these templates are creaf.

These Blueprints have been built onto Actor Components so they can be easily attached and accessed by the number of relevant Actors tied into the Power-Up system, including the enemies that drop Power-Ups, the visually distinct containers that hold them when those enemies are defeated, and the players that pick up and use them against new enemies. These modular Actor Components reflect the modularity of the Power-Up system itself, which where built specifically with quickly customization and easy iterative prototyping in mind.

With the current Power-Ups it’s as simple as creating a child Actor Component of one of the above base templates, then modifying the relevant variables in the editor like range, shot cooldown, and the kind of projectile being fired out (which also have unique behavior dictated in similarly templated Blueprints). With the ShootBase template alone I’ve created rapid fire blasts energy rifles, massive single shot cannons, and even wide spread blunderbusses with long cooldowns. This approach has already saved me a significant amount of time any time I need to make a sweeping change to a Power-Up archetype or balance adjustments to a single Power-Up, and should ensure that making the wide array of Power-Ups needed for Feast is a streamlined and simple process.

What’s Next?

Looking forward, the next push for Feast will be about building with the tools I’ve laid out and creating a handful of systems that still remain. Keep an eye out for the following in the next dev log:

• More Power Ups

• More Enemies

• Level Progression & Scoring

• Utility Power-Up Rework

Thanks for catching up on Feast, see you soon for Dev Log 3!