Week 01 – 21st-27th October
Tasks Planned –
- Create Final level design
- Choose my targets spawn location
- Finalise the random spawn mechanic
So far this week I have managed to create my final level design which I am very happy with. The design is heavily influenced by my ideas gen as coming out of this phase of my project I had a very good idea of what I wanted to achieve with the design of the level and how I wanted it to look so my idea came together seamlessly and didn’t take me very long which has given me a lot more time to work on the other tasks that I have set myself for this week however I did add some new blockout pieces to the level design such as a water tower to give the back half of the level a different feel to the first half. I also opted to stay with my blocked out level design as with me previous reasons in my ideas gen I believe as a programmer this has given me more time to think about and create the mechanics for my game
Also this week I have finished deciding on the placement of my enemies in the level. I put a lot of thought into this and referenced other games of a similar nature to my own to help me choose based on the design on my level the best way to layout all of my enemies and this took some time and some play testing to get a setup that felt right and gave the level a natural flow without any enemies in jarring locations that would counteract the flow of my level design. I did find this task quite difficult as it was time consuming getting something that I was happy with but once I did I was extremely happy with the outcome and this left me 2 days this week to tweak the mechanics of my random spawning.
Lastly this week I came to finish of the spawning mechanic of my collectibles in my level. I wanted them to spawn in random locations throughout the level that would be different with each play through of the game and I had already got this mechanic working in my test program so what I had to do was add in the additional spawn locations on the array and then choose where in my level I want to place my spawn locations and this didn’t take me too long as I already had the experience with placing my enemies throughout the level so I had an idea of how to keep the flow going with the placement of the collectibles whilst not making them too obvious so the player will still have to look out for them.
For next week I plan on working at the same pace as I have done this week as I feel I have made great strides towards the final product of my game. next week I hope to have created the mechanic for ending my game based on killing all the targets and collecting all the collectibles.
Week 02 – 28th October – 3rd November
- Create end game mechanic
- Create friendly targets
At the start of this week I began the creation of my game ending mechanic and to do this I have a bool setup in my game start trigger that is set to true when you overlap with it therefore to make the level timer end I need to set that bool to false. With my game ending mechanic I also wanted it to only trigger if you had both collected all the collectibles in the level as well as destroyed all of the targets so I set it to on overlap check if the target count was equal to the number of targets in the level as well as if the collectible count has reached ten. I didn’t find myself having any trouble when creating this mechanic as it is quite a simple concept for me to understand and setup and it works as I need it to.
The other thing I accomplished this week was the creation of my friendly targets that if destroyed they would add a time penalty to the player. when I first attempted this I ran into an issue where I tried to create the mechanic within the same blueprint as my timer however because my timer blueprint starts with an OnEventTick it meant that when I destroyed my friendly target it would add the time penalty ever tick which is not what I wanted. I got the mechanic to work when I moved the mechanic into my player blueprint that applied the time penalty upon shooting and destroying the friendly target which made it run a lot smoother and fixed my issue.
Going into next week I will continue at my current pace as I feel that I am on track to finish my game on time and I hope that going through next week I am able to add a main menu scene as well as a pause screen.
Week 03 – 4th – 10th November
- Create pause menu
- Create main menu
- add restart mechanic
Coming into this week I wanted to add some form of UI and menu system so that you have a precursor before being thrown into the game and thus was quite simple to setup. I used my current level design as my background for the main menu and I did this by duplicating my map and then added a camera to the level and then made it static in a position that overlooked part of my level. This was my first time setting up a menu system inside of UE4 and I found it very intuitive and quite easy as it gave me no real trouble and I was able to have it setup with a layout I was happy with and with fully functional buttons that allowed me to navigate to my game level.
Secondly this week I created my pause menu and then integrated the ability for the player to manually reset the level as well. the pause menu was a little more blueprint heavy when it came to setting it up as I had to setup bools so that the game knows when it is paused so that it can set the game state to paused as well add the pause menu UI to the viewport, I found this more challenging to setup compared to the main menu however it still didnt give me any trouble and I was able to set it up relatively quickly. I also added my reset mechanic to the pause menu so that at any point during the level the player is able to easily reset the level state and try their run of the level again. This was also very easy for me to setup as it was a simple as setting up a button to load the current level state again.
I feel as though I have blown through all the work I set myself this week very easily so going into the final week I will give myself more work to do and try and spend sometime refining some existing mechanics.
Week 04 – 11th – 15th November
- Add reload animation
- Refine targets being destroyed
- add more spawn points for collectibles
- change timer to two decimal places
Going into the start of this week I wanted to give the player some kind of visual feedback for reloading the gun in my game as currently you cannot tell you are reloading. I added a timeline to my reload mechanic within my player blueprint that rotates the weapon out of my camera view and then back in when the gun is then filled with bullets but I ran into an issue that caused my reload animation to affect the reload time of my gun which made it ignore its delay and instantly reload. To overcome my issue I realised that because the two functions are running in a straight line it was causing the delay to be ignored so to fix this I added a sequence to split the pathways so that the two mechanics ran separately and this fixed my issue. I found setting up this animation somewhat challenging as I ran into some bugs and issues with it though I was able to overcome these issues by using my logical problem solving skills and my knowledge of UE4.
Secondly this week I had an issue that was causing my targets to not destroy which I found when having my peers playtest my game and then upon further testing I realised that the issue was rooted in the fact that there was a delay in place when destroying my targets that was set for too long which meant when two targets were shoot within the delay window it would cause the first targets destroy function to be ignored so to fix this I simply shortened the delay and this meant the destroy function would run in time every time however if I had some more time I would’ve liked to find a better fix for this problem.
Lastly I made some small changes to better refine the player experience in my game and the first of these changes was adding some additional spawn points for my collectibles and this was so that each play through of the game was a little more unique and less predictable as I think this adds some more replay ability to the level. Another change I made was to set the timer to two decimal places as I feel this looks a lot neater and better presented to the player though I think for my timer mechanic overall if I was to make it again I would set it up as a float to have a more specific value for the time making the game more accurate and competitive
Level3GamesDevelopmentYear2LukeWadey 