DAAC | Unreal | Isometric Shooter

DAAC is the temporary name for a long-standing project that has gone through several changes in terms of game engine and genre. Now, DAAC has settled into being an Isometric Shooter in the Unreal Engine. I started making devlogs about it for my friends, but to my suprise it gathered a considerable amount of views, and a fanbase started to build.

Since then I've continued to work on the game, creating devlogs periodically to keep the community up to date. I also started a Discord server in order to have a place where everyone can gather and recieve news. In each video I go through some of the suggestions from the viewers who commented on the last video. I explain why some ideas are good and why some are bad, and consider the work needed to implement the ones I like.

Developing DAAC has come with some challenges that are satisfying to overcome. Designing a game in an isometric perspective is pretty different from the more common first and third person. Having to consider what the player sees at all times and what they can't or shouldn't see is something that is prevelant in making the level layouts.

The biggest challenge so far has been designing the UI. I thought, since the camera is pulled back so much, that there would be plenty of screen real estate. It turns out that since the player can't directly control the camera compared to something like a first person game, it's vital the the UI doesn't block anything important such as enemies. One itteration of the UI was pre-rendered in Blender and imported as images to Unreal. It was too large, solid, and rather distracting. It didn't last long.

One condition I had for the UI was that it needed to have a spot for the character portrait. Dialogue during missions would have a textbox pop up alongside the portrait of the other character that was speaking, so I needed to make sure there was space for that too. At first I thought having the portrait be in the upper part of the screen would fit, but naturally the levels are laid out to where the player usually travels towards the top of the screen - rendering any UI element up there to be annoying.

Since this is still in development though, many of these things are subject to change. There are many other design philosphies I can't fit on this page that I cover in the devlogs. My goal is to release a demo that includes a mission and the "home base" area in the following few months.