UE4 – The Maskening – BrokenTripod

Introduction:

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Allen Pan created a launcher that launches masks onto people’s faces. Around this time, I was experimenting with Unreal Engine 4 and decided the scope of my project was too large.

A Discord server I’m on linked to the Reddit post and highlighted one of the comments:

It occurred to me that this would be a “quick” project to approximate in UE4, so I asked the team if it would be better as an FPS or third-person. Karva said “The only problem is that once this is all over the game would be out of date” and “third person so you can customize your mask.” I came up with the cringeworthy phrase: “maskrotransactions.”

I knew I wouldn’t get to any sort of mask customization, but I started up a new UE4 project with the Third Person Template and got to adding some basic functionality for a Tower Defense game.

Progress:

After getting basic pathfinding into the game, I created path through some rectangles that would eventually be shelves inside a store. I realized I’d need the AI to do a bit of crowd control, since there were potentially going to be a lot of customers so I used the “Detour Crowd AI Controller” which has some embedded functionality for avoiding other objects. A list of YouTube tutorials that came in handy are at the bottom of this post.

After getting AI pathfinding to work, I wanted to incorporate the mask launching. I followed a few tutorials related to adding a weapon to third person and found it was a bit more involved than expected (as is everything). I did a quick mask model using primitive objects in Asset Forge and threw it onto the default mannequin for the player model, then copied that onto the customer models.

I used Joe Wintergreen’s debug lines tutorial to emulate bullet trails so you could vaguely tell where you were shooting since there was no crosshair and the mask launcher was literally a cylinder in the mannequin’s arms.

When the mask is applied to a customer, I adjust the visibility on the mask and apply a blue hue to the customer’s material so it’s easier to tell at a distance.

I posted the gif on Twitter and Allen Pan (the guy who made the original video) commented on it. I am admittedly not an artist, so I went onto the UE4 Marketplace and found a few grocery store/convenience store looking assets and made some very minor edits.

My computer/UE4 has a weird error where I had to turn off screenspace reflections otherwise there were some pretty horrendous reflections off the pavement.

Screenspace reflections turned on is bad for me

“Final” Product:

The Maskening was certainly an interesting side project and ended up taking a lot more time than I thought it would. As of November 4, 2020, the map loads with 2 maskless customers who pick a random route through the store. There’s a trigger you can step on to spawn additional enemies and you’ve got 50 masks in your launcher. The words “Wave 1 of 10” display at the top and there’s no functionality there.