UE5 provides the toy soldier firepower in Green Hawk Platoon
November 4, 2024
Hello, I’m Nick Romick, co-founder of RetroPixel Digital, a Vancouver-based video game studio and entertainment company focused on creating original games and cinematic content for PC, console, and online streaming services.
Made with Unreal Engine 5, our latest project Green Hawk Platoon is an action-packed, single player and multiplayer FPS that immerses you in the world's smallest army. Team up with your friends as toy soldiers and wage epic battles across many household battlegrounds like the kitchen, bedroom, backyard, or beach, as you fight for dominance and control over your tiny world!
Made with Unreal Engine 5, our latest project Green Hawk Platoon is an action-packed, single player and multiplayer FPS that immerses you in the world's smallest army. Team up with your friends as toy soldiers and wage epic battles across many household battlegrounds like the kitchen, bedroom, backyard, or beach, as you fight for dominance and control over your tiny world!
Watch our latest Inside Unreal Livestream and check out just some of the UE5 features we used to bring our nostalgic toy soldier memories to life.
Lumen
Lumen really enabled us to make the game look realistic. We wanted to combine a fun, playful mood with ultra-realistic visuals, lighting, and effects without negatively affecting FPS. The real-time interactive lighting and improved reflections really make the game pop. Adding volumetric lighting and god rays really helped make our environments look so much more beautiful. Without Lumen at our disposal, we would have probably gone with a more stylized approach—which wasn’t our original vision.
Control Rig
Using Control Rig in Unreal Engine really helped us easily edit animations on the fly. This saved us a lot of time by not having to re-import animations from other applications when making minor changes. The built in Control Rig for the UE Mannequin helped us easily adjust our characters’ pose, especially when working with FPS animations, where the placement of the characters’ hands on weapons is especially important. When using Control Rig in Sequencer, it enabled us to make minor edits from our motion capture pipeline quickly and easily.
Niagara
Being able to create beautiful visual effects in real time without dropping the frame rate is very important when developing video games. Performance is key and so is the quality of visuals. Niagara enabled us to get the best of both worlds with its amazing performance and flexibility. From seeing heat distortion when getting too close to a fireplace to seeing the cold frost billowing out of a freezer, Niagara really helped us build a visually stunning look.
Sequencer
Since we love making lots of cinematics and short animated videos relating to the game, Sequencer has become one of the top tools in our cinematic tool belt. The linear editor is wonderful to work with, and the raw power and flexibility of any of the cinematic tools in UE make this suite of tools essential for any artist. While working on our cinematic trailer, Sequencer really helped give us full control of the entire sequence by enabling us to cut together the entire trailer sequence in the editor before rendering.
Epic Online Services
From the very beginning, we wanted to make sure that the game would be easily ported to consoles. We built our multiplayer framework on the Epic Online Services system, so crossplay would be an option once we got to that point. This also enables PC users on the Epic Store and Steam to play seamlessly on the same servers as consoles. EOS also stores all character stats, XP, in-game items, and even matchmaking information across all platforms, making for a much better experience for our players.
Want to check out the amazing visuals and addictive gameplay of Green Hawk Platoon for yourself? It’s coming soon to the Epic Games Store—click here to add to your wishlist.
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