Jiří Vojtěch

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Year 2 block B Project at BUas. Released on 05/02/2023

Sailing System -
Available on Unreal Marketplace

Project Brief Summary:

Pick any game and recreate a feature from that game in Unreal Engine 5.

My Project:

I picked Sea of Thieves from Rare and decided to rebuild their sailing system.

During this project, I did many things:

Project Aftermath:

My project was clean and polished, so after consulting with my lecturers, I decided to release it on Unreal Marketplace. Release on 05/02/2023.

So far, I sold +100 copies, helping developers with their sailing needs. I received positive reviews and have been updating the Sailing System to the newest versions of Unreal Engine.

Academic Review:

My lecturers wrote: Keep up the great work, your dedication to your craft is evident in the quality of your work.

Research of Sea of Thieves

I spent many hours in the game, exploring the sailing mechanics and surrounding systems. I also spent time outside the game, where I found a lot of info about the actual velocities of the ship during different rotations of the sail. This led me to the idea of making my software to get the velocities from the game itself and, therefore, have precise data.

Research Unreal Engine 5

For this research one of the most important question was: What water solution do I use? I looked into Unreal Water Plugin and NVidia Wave Works. I decided to go with Unreal Water Plugin is it supports the latest unreal, looks reasonably, users of my package can easily configure it and I can distribute through marketplace with my boats.

Another research was about visual code best practices, wind solutions, water buoyancy and similar, altogether coming to 8 research topics.

The Engine Research Document

The Game Research Document

Blueprinting in Unreal Engine 5

These are the main systems I created in Blueprints:

  • Steering of the boat
  • Adjusting the Sail (Up and Down)
  • Adjusting the Sail (Left and Right)
The Sail affects rotation and length together with wind direction, directly affecting the boat’s speed, so there is quite a bit of math involved in all these systems. Everything is made with the user in mind, so the package is easily expandable and clearly commented for beginners to understand the logic behind the blueprints.

Any number of unique boat configurations can be made with limited settings for the designer to play with. Designers get enough variables to give them a lot of agency over the player experience and not too much to overwhelm them.

Clearly Commented And Organized Blueprints from the Sailing System

Gif of the Sailing System (Look for videos to see it in better resolution)

Pitches

During this project, I had to do several pitches, both written and spoken.

  • Beginning of the project – project proposal
    • Convince lecturers that I knew how to approach the feature and that the scope was feasible.
  • Check-ups with the team
    • Inform the study group about the progress, share insights and help others.
  • End of project presentation/pitch
    • Sell the product to the audience

Sailing System Proposal Document

Final Presentation/Pitch

Documentation

I created documentation for this Sailing System:

  • How To Document
    • A document that explains everything there is to know about when using this system
  • Setup Video
    • Video showing how to work with the package
  • Discord Server
    • Where I provide support for this package

You can find these on the Unreal Engine Marketplace page or you can see the video below.

Release

I released this project on 05/02/2023 and sold over 50 copies. If you are a recruiter, BUas student (for study purposes), or someone who is hiring, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for a free copy to asses my work.
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