Creating fantastic portal mechanics in Unreal 4 with the Portals Blueprint Pack
Ever since the ancient days of Crash Bandicoot, the idea of jumping into a portal and appearing somewhere else was rooted solidly in my mind as the coolest thing in gaming.
Future Mike would have this reinforced by games like Portal 1–2 as well as ones like World of Warcraft.
The asset pack we are looking at is built to help aspiring devs add that magic into their world.
To start with the folder hierarchy is simple, most of the examples just iterations of one blueprint with small changes.
The example scene is laid out in such a way that no matter where you look you have a portal in your face, the character BP shoots both the normal balls that the FPS example brings to the table as well as cubes reminiscent of the Portal Games.
As with any portal mechanic, these are fun as heck to play around with. The example map has plenty of different examples of either what can be done with the portals or different types of portals.
Some of these are interesting examples like the Resizing variation below. The attention to the different possible mechanics that an end user may have for these assets is a huge strength for this pack, definitely making it work the cost.
The layout of the Blueprint is well notated and simple while still appearing incredibly complex to my artist eyes. That said, I was able to dig into it and pull on some threads and see how it ticked, so as a learning aid for a very specific thing it was definitely nice to play around with.
A great pack for a great mechanic. I have not experienced ALL of the asset store but this pack stands out as a good investment for any dev.
Some Pros to force your hand
- At $9.99 its an awesome mechanic for a hard to beat price
- The organization lends itself to easy iteration
- The different examples are basically drag and drop for any of your purposes.
Some cons to take away.
- Not Free, always a con unfortunately even if the price is reasonable.
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