Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (part two)

Hello!
Continuing from the last post, here are the other things that went wrong with the BGP project (from my perspective at least). Note that I’ll be using the words ‘workplace’ and ‘office’ interchangeably when referring to the room that was set aside for my group to work on the project in.
Working hours & presence at the workplace
The working hours for the group were initially set, from 9:00 / 10:00 to 17:00 / 18:00 (some flextime was allowed). This would have […]

Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (part one)

Hello!
I think I’ve been pushing this in front of me long enough now. This will be a bit uncomfortable for me to write about, but it needs to be done. Hopefully I can help someone avoid at least some of the mistakes that I and my group made during this project.
Lone programmer
The first thing I’d like to bring up is the fact that I was the only programmer on the team for most of the project as the only other […]

Post BGP 2015 – What went wrong (prelude)

Hello all!
As you might have guessed by now the BGP project is over and it was, unfortunately, a failure. This is especially frustrating when considering the fact that it might well have been successful if we had one or two more weeks to complete it, but deadlines are deadlines. I will try to outline what I believe to be the main reasons the project was unsuccessful.
There is quite a lot to cover so I will divide this into several posts. The […]

BGP 2015 – sixth week: Development issues

Hello!
This week I started by giving the camera some simple movement behavior. Basically I make it follow the player’s position (with a certain offset) and rotation though somewhat slowly so that it’s movement becomes more smooth rather than sudden and jerky. I am mainly making use of ‘Slerp’ and ‘SmoothDamp’ for the camera’s movement.
I’ve also managed to get the direction correction for the movement to work as intended. What I had missed was that I needed to make use of conversion between […]

BGP 2015 – fifth week: Trouble with player movement.

Hello!
This week I’ve mainly been working on the player movement. I tried making it more controllable by the player. This was done by changing the direction of the rigidbody’s velocity to a forward vector multiplied by the magnitude of the old velocity. However this meant that the parts of the velocity that made up movement other than acceleration, such as jumping or strafing, also became a forward vector. As such jumping, strafing, tackling and gravity was ruined, but the […]

BGP 2015 – fourth week: loops, turns, rotations & illness

Hello!
This week has been pretty bad for me because I’ve been ill for the most part and as such have not been able to work as much on the project. It really does wonders for your stress levels.
I have been able fix the custom gravity effect for loops and turns by making prefabs that are essentially trigger boxes that apply a gravity effect on any players within them. The direction of the gravity effect is determined by the rotation […]

BGP 2015 – thrid week, minor crisis & Pre-Alpha

Hello.
This week the only other programmer in our group had to drop out due to personal reasons. This left us in a minor crisis since I am the only programmer in the group now, though one of the other team members know some basic C# scripting in Unity3D which will hopefully help me somewhat. The focus this week was to get a pre-alpha build ready for play testing.
I’ve abandoned using ‘actual’ hovering on the vehicles for now in favor […]

BGP 2015 – Second week, Swithcing to Unity3D 5 & First playable

Hello.
This week we decided to switch to the Unity3D engine. The reason for doing this was because we programmers could not find a way to make a custom gravitational effect work with the player movement because of how Unreal handles forces in relation to character controllers. We programmers were also inexperienced with the Unreal engine, which was also a factor.
We do both have experience with working in the Unity3D engine however, so after talking to the rest of the […]

BGP 2015 – First Week, Learning the Unreal 4 Engine

Hello!
 
This week I’ve been doing research on the Unreal 4 engine. This is the engine that will be used to make our game, so I’ll need to be as familiar with it as I possibly can, at least the scripting part of it. The game my group is making is a racing game that takes inspiration from F-ZERO, Wipeout and Distance.
I started out learning about blueprints and how they can be used. Blueprints are a visual form of scripting built […]

BGP 2015 – Initial Post

Hello.
 
This is my initial post for Big Game Project (BGP). First order of business is to set up an individual Blog and start working on a first playable.
I am part of the team for Project Steel, a racing game project.
My role in the project is AI programming, though development for AI won’t start until we have our first playable. Until then I am a general programmer.
I will be posting updates on my progress at least once each week.

Game programming – the ninth week, work on the third assignment

This week I continued my work on the particle effects. We have three distinct effects in our game now: explosions, smoke and bubbles.
Next week will be focused on wrapping up the game project as well as presenting it.

Game programming III – the eight week, work on the third assignment

Hello.
This week was new yers, so little has been done in the way of work. I’ve created and implemented and input class for gamepads and I’ve started working on the particle effects, which will continue on to next week.
Cheers!