Pre-alpha game testing day.

Yesterday we worked to get out individual tasks done, my tasks were to find a way of adding spells to the player properly, adding a marker to display what enemy or object was current being targeted and if i got time over, clean up the player blueprint event graph.
Adding the spells properly required working spells, (not really but it would make it easier to see if it was working) so i went straight to making a targeting marker. The way […]

Nothing much

A slow day today, I worked mainly on making a spell show up when a button was pressed and setting up cool downs for the sticks which empties the stick paths over time.
The most interesting things today was helping another programmer with his spell system which would only fire one spell and then stop working. In the end we concluded that he had set it up wrong and setting it back up fixed the issue. I also played around with […]

The sum of its inputs

Finally the system for handling inputs is complete, the reason i didn’t post yesterday is because i spent all day getting to a point where i could test the function for comparing two integer arrays to each other. (actually checking if the first array contains the second at some part) However, when testing to make sure the function worked as it should i kept getting an error claiming that the variables were out of scope. 
After several hours of searching […]

Logical gymnastics

No blog post yesterday since i didn’t have any noticeable success so it didn’t feel worth it to write one.
Today i finished the input system for the spells, the idea behind the system is fairly simple; check if the stick is in* one of 9 specified positions*, return that position’s assigned number and place it into an array of Integers*. Then compare the array with the arrays included in the spells available to the player*, if they match then the player […]

Crafting spells and stuff

So all my good mood from yesterday was decimated by GTA not working properly. (For no reason)
Today was a less productive day but still a fruitful day after all, my productivity was reduced by a seminar on the morning about how to write our synopsis and a tutoring session on the afternoon. Interesting and important as these were, they still weren’t actual work.
As for actual work today however, I looked into the spell system we had purchased and found out […]

I will not make this title “Learning how to spell”

A good day today, plenty of progress and didn’t really get stuck. I spent most of the day setting up the input structure for the spell system. The idea is to read the stick inputs when the play is holding down the corresponding trigger and then compare the movements with a list of locations which are assigned to a spell each which can then be cast.
The “Magic cast” function has three segments: Read Stick Input, Compare To Player Spells and […]

Targeting, now actually working.

No post last Friday since I didn’t manage to finish the lock-on system.
What i needed to do was searching through the list of targets until i found the current locked target, then find the next non-enemy target in the list and set it to become the current target by looping through the rest of the array of targets. The problem was the fact that the first target might not be the first target in the list which meant that if […]

Target acquired

Lots of good progress with the lock-on system today. At it’s best i was able to lock the camera onto a flying orb and then swap the camera’s focus between it and another orb. However i had made the class used in the function a class named ‘Dummy’ and as such had to replace it with the class ‘Enemy’. This caused many of the references to the class to need reworking which took some time. Afterwards i realized i could […]

New week

And it’s already almost over!
Thankfully we had a meeting on Monday afternoon where we discussed what needed to be done this week. We are now a full 3 programmers team which should help with the programming burden.
Yesterday both me and another programmer worked on a tutorial for Unreal’s inbuilt Behavior Tree functionality, he was originally set to be the AI programmer but i wanted to see how the system worked on my own. In the end I’m actually glad he […]

Spaghetti Harakat

Today I worked on the game’s Harakat (Arabic for ‘movement’) mode and the HUD for the prototype. As it turns out, the Unreal engine has excellent functionality for creating both of these. We’re creating a slow-motion effect by running a console command when both sticks on the gamepad are pressed at the same time. There is a health meter and a harakat meter which responds to the current player values, the harakat value is used to determine if the […]

Back to work.

I’m a bit rusty on the blogging but now it’s a course requirement again so here we go.
Big Game Project have started and my previous efforts have landed me a position in a group. Fantastic.
I was contacted to join the group on Sunday and officially joined the group in it’s office on Tuesday morning. The group names is Giraffic Art and our game is a third-person game where the player controls a character and casts spells by moving analoge sticks. […]

It’s actually fine

Good news. We have a game after all.
We finally managed to get help on drawing our 3d models as well as our 2d models. With this done we were able to create working HUD and draw 3d objects on the screen. Tomorrow we will use this to create actual 3d models to assign to the existing game objects and make sure the game logic works properly and we’ll be all done.
As it turns out, there were several issues with our […]