I didn't end up doing as much as I wanted over winter break. My time in Unreal was spent working out some immediate bugs (to some success). The use of networking is still proving a big hassle, with features having been long complete on player 1, but still not working on player 2. I had hoped to fix a lot of networking issues and add animations to the grapple, but I didn't make that happen. I studied up a lot on networking in blueprints, though, and hopefully I can fix networking issues soon (like health bars working better on server players).
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The last two weeks were very productive for finishing/adding features to the game. I got the shooting to the point where it's a complete representation of the mechanic fit for the Alpha build. The health system is also implemented (although only complete enough to show the mechanic in the build). One of the biggest problems I had was making events that worked perfectly on the server work on the client as well. Sometimes I'd get just the server working, other times the client would seem like it worked but not show on the server, vice versa, and more. Looking back near the end of the quarter, despite fixing a lot of our gameplay design, adding networking to the game was a huge challenge. We understood it would be, but it's still impossible to have predicted the amount of time that went in.
Along with the implemented mechanics, I finally fixed a ton of bugs that were in the game. The HUD now works client side and on the dragon, no grappling to yourself or falling while grappling, and lots of other small less noticeable bugs that piled up. Pros: Many bugs fixed Health and Shooting in the game (albeit still buggy) Very productive Cons: Not as many features as I hoped by now Always more bugs Despite being productive when I was on campus, when I was away for the vacation I didn't have access to Unreal. Thankfully my computer just got fixed and it won't be a problem for winter break. Hours Worked: 38 The last two weeks were pretty productive when it came to getting hours in on the project. Unfortunately, most of that didn't translate in to new features for the game. Two weeks ago, we discovered a game breaking bug in the networking. Client side players could run around and jump in the server, but anything else they did wouldn't carry over. For example, if the client were to grapple or try to fly, they would experience severe jittering without going anywhere. From the server player's point of view, they wouldn't be doing anything. Ruben, Kevin, and I spent almost all of our hours that week working on it, and finally figured out how to correctly communicate between the client and server in blueprint. Last week was more about actual features. Sally brought the first rider character in to Unreal and retargeted it to the default animations. My first job was reapplying old features to make sure they worked. After that, I got an aim feature working, as a step towards combat. The player can zoom in and look around. This bends the skeleton accordingly, and plays the aiming animation (a placeholder for now). Pros: A lot of work was done on the game Part of the weapon is done Cons: A lot of hours went in to fixing networking Spent a lot of time unsuccessfully learning IK in Unreal The big challenge I've been working on for the past two weeks is the custom character controller. So far I've been able to create the simple stuff like walking, running, jumping, etc. However, there are more specialized movement states I'm having trouble with. The main one I've been sinking time in to is the wall grapple. It needs to have a moving towards grapple target state, and a state where it's attached to the wall. Both of these have been giving me trouble. Speaking of the grappling, I've been working with Ruben to figure out how best to implement my work in to the networked game, and discovered that the way I was previously doing grappling wouldn't work. Originally it worked by having a separate object in the world attach to the player, and that would be the grapple. Unfortunately, that won't work when all the players spawn in at once. Because of that, the grapple is defaulting to firing from the center of the character, rather than the wrist, which feels like a step backward. Right now I'm making it so that the grapple is a part of the character blueprint, which should fix the problem. Unfortunately, as far as programming goes, I'm pretty far behind. My home computer broke, and hasn't been repaired yet. Between not having a computer at home and not having Unreal in most of the lab computers, I haven't had as many opportunities to work in engine as I'd hoped. In the mean time, my time over the last two weeks has been spent going over game designs with the art and programming teams, especially after the critique we received from our pitch presentation. A large part of the redesign has included figuring out exactly what role we want the dragons and riders to play, and how to promote that to the players. After making a paper prototype to play out our ideas, we figured out that through the map design, we could influence what players did with their characters. Teams would naturally break up their game in to two stages. The first stage has been the dragon guiding the rider to nearby islands to capture them. This is done through one of the rider's unique abilities, which is to place and reinforce totems, which are used to claim islands. Once islands become more scarce, and the timer gets shorter, player strategy changes drastically as teams are forced to plan out attacks on each other, trying to kill other players and take advantage of re spawn time to steal their islands.
Pros: Game Mechanics came a long way since last pitch I was able to help a bunch without my computer Paper prototype turned out to be very helpful Cons: Without Unreal, I got pretty far behind and need to catch up For the last two weeks, the majority of what I’ve been doing is working in the biweekly meetings, trying to nail down for good what our game is actually going to be. In the two meetings since our initial game pitch, we’ve worked on completely restructuring our game. We’ve gone from a game with a series of back-to-back objectives, to a game with a much more in depth goal. Part of what I’ve been doing as part of the programming team is working to figure out what is feasible, and how to make the game possible for the short time we have to work.
Outside of our meetings, I’ve been working on setting up a custom character controller, which will become the base of our human character. Right now it’s just a mess of blueprint nodes, but by next week I’m looking forward to showing off some of the work I’ve done in Unreal this quarter. Pros: The game is in a much more solid stage of design, and something I feel we can move forward with. Cons: I was hoping to be further along with the human character by now |
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