Overview
- Role: Solo Dev
- Platform: PC, Xbox, Playstation
- Tools: Unreal Engine 5
Robot Family was my submission for the 2025 Unreal Stack ‘O’ Jam. My goals for this game jam were to build something fun, dive into Unreal’s AI systems, and meet the 6-day deadline.
The Robot Family Behavioral System™️ gives you the ability to gather and control as many small yellow robots as you can find. With a big enough family, you can take on some larger-than-life enemies!
Design and development
The design and development of the Robot Family System™️ can be broken down into four parts:
1. Gathering
When a player ‘gathers’, a white circle spawns underneath them and grows as they hold down the button. On release, all ‘gatherable’ family members within the radius are collected and moved to ‘following. I made the circle decal myself and hooked it up to a simple timeline that, over time, increases the Y/Z Float, setting the radius as a variable that’s applied to ‘sphere overlap actors’ on release.
2. Following:
Before a robot family member is gathered, they are idle: walking to random reachable points within a radius to make it appear as if they are slowly wandering around. On ‘gather’ they are given an AI controller and speed increase. The AI controller points to a behavior tree that has a sequence of rotate to, move to, and wait. The initial speed increase could be looked at as a bug but I like how it gives them a fun little ‘panicked zip’ when they’re gathered.
3. Releasing:
The code for releasing is simply removing the AI controller from the robot family members. I thought about switching them back to idle, but for the purposes of the clip/demo, I have them stand still so when I showed the functionality, it wasn’t like herding cats.
4. Attacking:
The Attack System is a sphere trace channel that attaches a ‘targeted’ component if the sphere collides with an enemy. The robot family members are searching for this component in the aforementioned ‘following’ condition. So when a family member is following, it’s also always checking to see if it should switch to fighting a targeted enemy. After an enemy is terninated, family members are switched back to following.
The most complex part of the attack system and potentially development in general was visually showing that this system was working. I created a health bar UI for the enemies, added a sphere to show when an enemy was targeted, rebuilt the robot animation system to smoothly transition to attacking/punching, and created an SFX system that made sure punching sounds were played at a good pace. With a little more time, this could’ve been a little more polishe,d but I was satisfied with the overall game feel for attacking.
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