GameDev Xmas Challenge – Day 3: “Almost winnable”

Hour 3 has unfolded and some more progress has been made. Again, mostly code stuff and not so much visuals however the core game is almost winnable! There is now full logic for winning a section, which means that in addition to just rows from yesterday’s progress you can now also win by columns and diagonals.
However due to an unforeseen bug (are they ever foreseeable?) I broke how sections are marked invalid which caused you to be unable to win […]

GameDev Xmas Challenge – Day 2: System code

Another day and another hour done! Working on a fresh new project often means that you’ll spend the first half of the project coding the underlying system, so sorry in advance for the lack of cool images in this post Hopefully the time-lapse is cool enough!
Today I worked mostly on the turn-based nature of the gameplay. When a player now clicks on their chosen tile the camera moves back to viewing all sections and the next player can make […]

GameDev Xmas Challenge – Day 1: Setup and prototyping!

Challenge?
A friend of mine made me aware of a post on the Unreal Engine 4 Developer Community Facebook group about a personal challenge blogged on nerd-time.com which I saw a great opportunity and motivation to get some side-projects done! Basically the challenge is this: Develop a game for 1 hour a day until the 24th. Simple as that. The challenge isn’t something hardcore and heavily organized with prizes and stuff but it is a great little motivation […]

UE4 shuffle array by RandomStream (C++)

I was doing a blueprint room script that would randomly spawn objects in the room. One thing led to another and I needed a way to shuffle an array of spawn points for room objects randomly (preferably in blueprints), but with a specified random seed, so that I could easily find a random order that I wanted to use and stick with it. Unreal Engine 4 has a built-in array shuffle function exposed to blueprints and randomness by seed with […]

Converted to wordpress!

So the site has been converted to WordPress! What does this mean? It looks pretty much the same right? Well, apart from the blog finally being integrated with the main site, yes, however the backend is completely fresh.
At first I was reluctant to convert to WordPress. I’m quite familiar with WordPress and its functionality but in committing to this architecture you generally have to sacrifice some flexibility due to the nature of the themes. After some searching and fiddling however […]

Project Nordic Prime – Targeting System update

Hi again! Just posting a short update on the targeting system for Project Nordic Prime. I’ve added some much needed new functionality and improved its codebase. The biggest issue right now however is the fact that movement around a targeted object does not follow the targeted circumference; still working on that. But I got basic free-aim going as well as being able to choose on a per-object basis if occlusion (objects gets hidden behind another object) should break the targetting, […]

Project Nordic Prime – introduction and first Targeting System iteration

I’m beginning a new side-project codenamed Project Nordic Prime. The idea is essentially to borrow major mechanics and game systems from the Metroid Prime series and put into a fresh title. I do not expect this project to take off but rather want it as a personal learning experience. It will be used to familiarize myself with Unreal Engine 4 on an more advanced level which will be useful for future endeavours.
Instead of the more traditional sci-fi theme, Project Nordic […]

Speedrunning design: non-critical bugs are features!

These days game developers spend quite the amount of time polish their products to perfection. Readily available engines, for example  Unity3D or Unreal Engine, leaves implementation of gameplay critical features such as collision to a dedicated team of experts, leaving us developers with a near perfect platform to build a game on. With minor tweaking glitches such as clipping through walls are practically extinct. Is this good or bad? A little bit of both.

For the speedrunning […]

Speedrunning design: non-critical bugs are features!

These days game developers spend quite the amount of time polish their products to perfection. Readily available engines, for example  Unity3D or Unreal Engine, leaves implementation of gameplay critical features such as collision to a dedicated team of experts, leaving us developers with a near perfect platform to build a game on. With minor tweaking glitches such as clipping through walls are practically extinct. Is this good or bad? A little bit of both.

For the speedrunning community this is a disaster. […]

Snart hemma!

Yo peeps, så då var det snart dags att färda hem! Lämna ön och de dyra fancy restaurangpriserna för gammal hederlig skånsk kebab och kinamat.
Paketet jag väntade på med skylten kom på bara en dag; hade jag verkligen inte förväntat mig med tanke på posten och Gotland och så vidare. Kudos till dom!
Ikväll drar vi ner till hamnen och lastar för fullt, sen kör vi tidigt i morgon bitti, runt halv sex tiden. Lär vara hemma runt middag imorrn […]

Perhaps last entry, part #2: Crunch, GGC and aftermath

So the last weeks that has ensued has been quite extreme and somewhat painful, yet very rewarding. It has been way more intense than during the development of CoBots and while we may be commended for our vitality, having to resort to crunch-time is by no means a praiseworthy skill. It boils down to unforseen circumstances, underestimated scheduling, and for my part, procrastination and lack of motivation. In hindsight there is always room for improvement but we figured during the […]

Perhaps last entry, part #1: PPX, trailer and more

Due to various near-deadline circumstances, I had to postpone blogging in order to finish the game. Therefore I’ve decided to split this major update into two; the first being a standard blog post with content that should be dated a couple of weeks back, and the second being some pre-GGC, GGC and post-GGC talk (GGC = Gotland Game Conference, if you haven’t read previous posts). So without further ado:

 PPX (Post-Processing Effects) and multiple Cameras
We had this problem where effect occurring on […]