Created a bow and arrow gameplay system on top of the third person template in Unreal Engine 5. The system has been designed to be modular in such a way that it can be used by both Player character as well as AI characters.
Integrated Mixamo character animations on Manny
Aiming mode with AimOffset animations for looking up or down
Arrow Kill-cam
Arrow Kill-cam
Assassin's Creed style slow-mo mode (it's a bug that's become a feature 🙃)
The system mainly consists of the BowMechanics Actor Component which handles all the logic for drawing, aiming and shooting arrows. Additionally the Bow and Arrow actor classes handle the animations and individual traits/attributes of the bow and arrow respectively. This system allows me to create multiple types of bows and arrows with their specialised attributes.
Since most of the assets were taken from free online resources, I had to tweak several of them to make sure everything worked well together. For example:
- The bow draw animation and the character draw animation were out of sync, so I adjusted the animations to match properly.
- The audio files I found online weren’t exactly what I needed, so I used Audacity to trim and tweak the sounds to better fit the game.
- Created a simple arrow trail niagara effect to give more immersion