Remote Bomb Shrine

Ongoing Unreal Engine 5 prototyping project which recreates the remote bomb mechanics and a shrine style level from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild.

The goal of the project is to deepen my UE5 technical skills.

Everything was scripted in Blueprints, or other native Unreal editors. I used the Third Person Character template as a foundation and Git / GitHub for source control.

I used and slightly modified assets from several different sources so please see the credits below for more details.

Asset Credits:

UI Elements - Kenny Game Assets

Cube bomb icon - From BOTW itself

Sphere bomb icon - Darius Dan

Reference tutorial, character animations - UE4WithCasey

All vfx - Rimaye.Std

Current Project Goals:

Currently I’m iterating on level design and gameplay beats. I have a first draft complete so please see the breakdown further below.

Longer term, once I’m satisfied with the remote bomb I may move onto another one of Link’s abilities! It would be really exciting to have built my own versions of each of them inside the same project.

Level Breakdown

The goals for the shrine-style level are the following:

  • Create a shrine level that captures the gameplay experience & environmental vibe from the real game.

  • Make full use of the remote bomb mechanic.

  • Work with the assumption that the player has no previous experience with the mechanic.

Pre-Blockout

I brainstormed different ideas & gameplay beats that I could do. I wanted to keep the overall experience similar to the real game so I borrowed a few commonly used shrine mechanics. This gave me a bit more to work with.

  • Interaction posts that can be triggered by a bomb’s explosion

  • Cannons that launch bombs far distances

  • Spheres that trigger interactions when they land in a designated hole.

These gave more concepts to play with and I ended up with the concept below.

After I landed on the above concept I created a quick bubble map and worked backwards to determine what the player needed to learn to understand the final challenge.

Blockout

This initial draft simply connects each space represented on the bubble map above. You can see the overall level layout below.

Entrance

We start with a safe space for players to learn and play around with the mechanics and controls. Plenty of objects to destroy and a few gems to collect.

Moving Platform Challenge

The first challenge the player encounters is to get to the chest on the brown platform. They can’t stand on the moving white platform all the way there so they’ll need to use a cube style bomb to destroy the chest’s platform and make it fall down.

Learning how to use interaction posts

This area introduces interaction posts, we communicate the mechanic by having a looping demo open a side area. Bombs continuously fall then detonate the post opening up and then closing a gate.

Final Challenge

The final challenge has the player use a block cannon to launch the bomb onto a platform. They blow up a cube found there which becomes a sphere and rolls into the hole below. Once in the hole the door to finish opens.

Mechanic Breakdown

Players can spawn, drop, pickup, throw, de-spawn, and detonate bombs. There are cube and sphere shaped options.

  • Player input is setup in the project settings, allowing for both keyboard and controller input.

  • Interaction logic is primarily contained in the Third Person Character (TPC), There are custom events for all major actions like spawn, detonate, throw etc.

  • The TPC controls booleans for animations, signaling the Anim BPs when to transition.

  • UI elements are used to control which bomb is spawned, locking off non-selected bomb types, and timing cooldowns.

  • The remote bomb BP itself handles detonating logic, as well as destroying walls.

Remote Bomb BP

Detonation is called from the TPC and is handled by the Detonate Bomb event.

Detecting available bombs works by doing a sphere trace around the bomb, and stores an array of overlapped objects.

Once the detonate event is called we spawn a Niagara system, make sure the bomb mesh itself is hidden away, then loop through the array to find wall BPs or other bombs and call their destroy / detonate events.

Spawn BP Example

*You can use ctrl + scroll & right click to navigate the BPs on the right*

First, we do several checks to make sure that our UI in the right state and that there’s no existing bomb in the world. If all is good we set our animation booleans to trigger the transitions.

We check a bomb selection Enum (from our UI) to determine which bomb type to consider, we spawn the desired bomb, and set it as a reference