Team project
Flash Drive 2026
Flash Drive is a two-player co-op driving shooter set in near-total darkness, in development in Unreal Engine 5.8 by a four-person RIT capstone team, with Luke Whited as Technical Lead and Art Lead.
What I did
Role: Technical Lead and Art Lead (backup Audio and Multiplayer Lead)
- Built the player Blueprints for the driver, the gunner and the main car, with each player in their own pawn seated in the car.
- Moved both seat sockets from the wheel hubs to the car’s root bone after A and D started turning the driver’s view, and fixed inverted vertical look with a Negate input modifier.
- Specified the driver’s radar: live with no sweep, heading locked to the car’s forward direction, shown on a small square screen on the dash.
Details
- Role
- Technical Lead and Art Lead (backup Audio and Multiplayer Lead)
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5.8
- Platform
- PC, planned for Steam
- Team
- 4 developers
- Status
- In development since fall 2026 (RIT MS Game Design and Development capstone)
- Tags
- Unreal Engine / Blueprints / Co-op / Capstone
Media
Flash Drive is a two-player online co-op first-person driving shooter set in near-total darkness. One player drives from an armored cab with a narrow view slit and a radar. The other stands in a roof turret and lights the way with gunfire and a flashlight while fighting off shadow creatures. The car’s bullet press makes more ammo the faster it drives, so the gunner depends on the driver to keep moving.
Personal contributions
- Built the player Blueprints for the driver, the gunner and the main car, with each player in their own pawn seated in the car.
- Moved both seat sockets from the wheel hubs to the car’s root bone after A and D started turning the driver’s view, and fixed inverted vertical look with a Negate input modifier.
- Specified the driver’s radar: live with no sweep, heading locked to the car’s forward direction, shown on a small square screen on the dash.
- Set the rules for the enemy rebuild: the gunner is always the main answer, the driver only gets utility (headlight flash, flare gun, running enemies over), clingers take one of five slots placed high enough to be shot off, and enemies have 100 HP.
- Defined two forest layouts to playtest against each other: a linear run with a true path to the objective, and an open, scattered layout where players find their own way.
- Imported a Fab foliage pack, picked the plants to keep, gave only the pines collision, and fixed pine wind by switching the material pivot to Instance & Particle Space.
- Ran two-player tests in the editor and recorded Unreal Insights traces that confirmed a radar rendering fix cut the average frame time from 29.8 ms to 8.6 ms.
Giving enemies their own speed
The first enemy prototype felt floaty. Enemies did not close in when the car braked or sped up hard, because their distance was tied to the car and ignored speed. For the rebuild I set the rule that enemies move with their own velocity, acceleration and turn limits. Testing that version, I saw them sprint past the car after hard braking, so I had their braking matched to the car’s. On my next run I outpaced them most of the time. I left it there, since difficulty can rise later.
