This script was made in Unreal 4 in Blueprint for a game focused on a ship rotating around the planet. This was accomplished using the spline component in Unreal and the mathematical function for finding a point on a circle. From there you could edit how many points there were. Not only that, but you could edit the spline points so, if at one point you wanted the ship to get closer to the planet it could easily accomplish it. Along with that, main objective of the game was to doge asteroids, and to do that we need asteroids to spawn on the path. I made it so that they spawned in rows around the planet along the spline, even when the curve was modified by the designers.

 

Further Iterations

The planet changed over the course of the game. Later on we would decide to scrap the original concept due to game design choices, instead leading to create something similar but that required simpler code. I used this to improve the tools that the artists and game designers used however. I changed it so that the asteroids didn’t spawn randomly anymore, but instead would take data from csv file and interpret the data for spawn times. This would allow the game designer to make it so that anyone could make changes in excel and then export the changes and they would be made instantly in Unreal. Other improvements included buildings being randomly generated on the planet for aesthetic purposes, as well as having our AI fly to certain positions on the planet.