Week 10 - Fresh threads

My biggest achievement this week was pulling out an old set of FBXs that I had created while on the break between semesters.

During that break, I participated in the Global Game Jam. During that jam, I focused on working with materials and creating characters for the game. In the end, I had created and rigged 2 characters.

One of these Characters was a barbarian sort of fellow. This was my first time working in Maya in a while and my first time creating an entire character from scratch.

As well as the model and rig, for the barbarian, I had also created a range of animations that could be imported into Unreal.

I also have this witch character that I was actually planning on using as the main playable character. The issue is that the witch model and animations all need some degree of fixing and re-exporting.

I'm not sure if I will have the time.

Setting up the animation blueprint was pretty simple. Then it was just a matter of getting the animations timed up with attacks. I used notifies on the animations to trigger the attack commands.

These Boots Were Made for Walking

Now that my enemies are looking a bit fancier, it's time to teach them a thing or two. I have always struggled with creating NPC behaviours, especially when using the behaviour tree.

The above is what I have so far for the Melee enemy class. I have been following a very good tutorial series to refresh me on how behaviour trees and blackboards work.

Ryan Laley:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4G2bSPE_8ukuajpXPlAE47Yez7EAyKMu

I have used his tutorials extensively in the last 2 semesters, often finding he is my go-to with questions or mechanics that I might want to try to implement.

On the note of tutorials. I have found that I really enjoy watching tutorials for Unreal. Obviously, in this project, it is a necessity, but I often find myself watching them as entertainment.

Sticky Widgets

I also made a start on some of the UI menus and HUD Elements. I had already started on the HUD, But now I have started work on one of the much more complicated HUD elements, Spellbook.

Each of the white squares is another widget. The Spellbook is more of a container for these 5 widgets.

Within each widget, blueprints will check against the player's current spells and put those icons in the correct places. Not only was this super satisfying when it worked for the first time, but I am also certain that the techniques that I implemented in this HUD element will be used again in future if not in this project.

This Week in Review

Working primarily on the AI this week makes me feel a bit better. It had been one of the elements of the game that I was most worried about. I think that in my next project, I am going to tackle these kinds of tasks first. Leaving them until the end really put a lot of stress that could have been avoided.