My Shooter Sandbox project has changed a lot since it first released as the FPS Template over a year ago, but its guiding principles have always been to provide you all with a collection of interesting mechanics and features that you can pick and choose from while building your own shooter projects.
One issue I keep running into when planning out new features is that every time I make a decision to design a mechanic in a specific way, it cuts off other avenues of exploration. This has the tendency to make the whole project more specific and specialized, and less useful to those of you who want to make a game that isn’t just Counter-Strike but with more orange.
This was never more apparent than when I started to port parts of the Sandbox over to a fresh project when creating my new game Fires Farther Afield. I’ve come to realise that the Sandbox needs less interlinked dependencies, and instead should provide more opportunity for chunks of the project to be wholesale rewritten or torn out at your own discretion.
This has led to the plugin-ification of a number of the Sandbox’s core systems, and replicated Attributes seemed like a good place to start sharing my progress.
Download the Unreal project
If you’re already a Patron of mine in the Tutorial Content tier you can download the Attribute System plugin right now via this downloads page. Let me know if you find it useful!
What does this mean for the Sandbox?
The Sandbox has received (yet another) significant overhaul in recent months, and a chunk of its functionality has been split out into the Attribute, Action, Inventory (this one is a significant upgrade, more on this soon), and Recoil Systems.
For those already working with the Sandbox, you may want to download this update as a separate project first and have a dig around before jumping ship. I can’t vouch the structural changes won’t have an impact on your existing work.
Thankfully, this process (which was quite complicated and involved) is now complete. The precedent for a more modular approach is in place, and I look forward to keeping them all updated as I work on the Sandbox, Fires Farther Afield, and the many other techarthub projects that leverage these systems.
Fires Farther Afield is going to be a little different from my other projects, and progress will happen in its own time. I look forward to sharing more with you soon.
