Game Gen - Week 35

-

Halloween! Woohoo!

Halloween is easily my favorite time of year, and while as I get older I don't get to do as many fun Halloween activities, I always try to at least go to a Halloween-themed Theme Park. This year, I added a new tradition to my Halloween festivities, creating a Halloween-themed game! While I couldn't submit it into the Halloween game jam, I still had a lot of fun attempting to create something in the timeline, completely myself with some support from my mentor Vives of course, with free assets or assets I create in Blender. 

This was quite the challenge, but extremely fun! While I still have a bug that makes the demo currently unplayable after a Shipping build, I will figure that out and get it uploaded to Itch.io for download. I got some clips from playing in the editor where the game functions properly for the most part. 

At first, I saw the wrong Game Jam poster, so I based my idea off of a combination of Gun Fight and a platformer. Once I realized this was actually the Kids and Teens event with Vives letting me know, I was already too far committed to change it so here is an Unreal Engine amalgamation of a Vampire themed Gunfight on platforms! 


Halloween Game Accomplishments: 

  • Mostly completed a full Unreal Engine 5.4 Game demo in about 4 weeks. (Only a few hours a day on weekdays. 
  • Created a boss character with 4 different attack options. 
  • Created moving and falling platforms. 
  • 3D modeled and UV'd a Coffin platform. 
  • Found and utilized free assets for level creation and hand-placed all world assets. 
  • Created a custom blood river material for the river's "water". 
  • Created custom AI Nav Links for jumping between platforms. 
  • Created a custom method for the boss to decide it's attack based on player's distance. 
  • Re-mapped animations and customized meshes of player and enemy meshes. 
  • Created all UI design and functionality. 
  • Developed and created all technical functionality of the world, character, and AI enemies. 
Here are some snippets of blueprints that I created for this game: 

Boss Attack Decision:
 

Shooting a Blood Bullet

Enemy Teleportation

In other News: Wave Function Collapse! 


I've been also having a lot of fun on a new hyperfocus lately, Wave Function Collapse! After playing around with two different plugins and being less-than-enthused with their functionality, difficulty to understand, and lack of diverse use cases, I began trying to develop my own functionality to use Wave Function Collapse to generate 3D landscapes and levels in Unreal Engine. 

So far, I'm having a bit of an issue with calculating the properties of the dimensions for the Grid Volume vs the Tile sizes but I was successfully able to generate a single tile in the Grid Volume I created, so that's something! 

My goal is to create a simple "template" of different tile types: corners, walls, interior fill, exterior fill, doorways, and eventually even stairways. Theoretically, every "feature" including a lake or river or room, etc is made up of these pieces, the only thing that really changes is the way they look. So, I'm attempting to improve upon the already created plugins to create a more user-friendly and versatile way of creating levels quickly with custom tiles. 

Here's how the architecture of the system works: 

I use Enums and a Struct to define the "Tile Data" that the developer will enter either through JSON, CSV, or manually. The things we need to know about a tile are what type they are, what edges can face a border, and what static mesh to use for it, as well as what other types of tiles can connect to it on each side. 

I use sockets to determine which side is which to prevent confusion from different axes used in different applications like Blender vs Unreal Engine. 

Once we have that data, then we just need to know which volume we want to generate in. We select the Grid Volume Actor we've placed and sized in the level and can generate in this area. 

I have some bugs to work out, but I think I'm really close to getting this working in the way I think is a more improved version of what I've seen out on the market for Unreal Plugins.

 
I don't want to share too much of my code on this tool, as I may want to try to sell it on the UE Plugins store or something, but I'll try to get a gif of it when I get it working. It was working sort of but after some attempted bug fixing it is currently not working properly. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Game Gen - Week 19

-
Image
Continuing in C++ and Unreal Engine! Over the last two weeks, I've focused on developing the core mechanics of my 2D resource game, "Star Paws." Here's a summary of the key C++ classes and functionality I've implemented: Here are the C++ Classes and functionality I've made over the last two weeks: Here's a short GIF of my 2D game, which is still very early in development.  Player Character  Setup : Created a Paper2D character using a C++ class, then converted it to a Blueprint. Functionality : The player character moves to the Base Console on tap, triggering the Base Management mission control menu upon arrival. A snippet of how we control the player's movement with timers.  Trade Table System  Structure : Developed a C++ class and Blueprint for managing trade goods using Enums and Structs. Mechanics : On interaction, items are sold, and the appropriate gold amount is added. NPCs trigger sales by moving to the table and purchasing items. A weighted sys
Read more

Game Gen - Week 1

-
Image
 This Week In My Adventures... Imported Public Domain Assets I utilized assets from various websites licensed with Public Domain to make the level more interesting.  Created Third Person Project Walked through setting up a new third-person project with Vives. Created Hamburger Pickup What started as just a plain white ball pickup turned into a fun giant hamburger, resulting in a normal-sized hamburger in your hand on collision.  Created Health and Mana Reduction Items for Testing I jazzed up the basic HP "damage" causing item and replicated it for mana reduction.  Created Health and Mana Potions for Restoration I found more public-domain assets online to use for my health and mana potions.  I then implemented the same functionality as my "damage-doers" but instead of subtracting from the variables, I added to them.  Created the Beginnings of UI with Functional Health and Mana bars.  Vives taught me how to start making a basic UI including a health bar. I then replic
Read more

Game Gen - Week 4

-
Image
This week, we really dove into many more of the deeper mechanics of Unreal Engine blueprinting and gameplay. We focused mainly on further developing the player character before moving on to start the actual gameplay loop mechanics. This involved delving into the math for curves, with which I'm not super familiar. However, Vives did an awesome job helping me understand, as did my girlfriend, who is way better at math than I am! Ha! This week I had a lot I accomplished, but here are the highlights: Improved character mechanics: We added a cooldown on the attack to prevent the character from freezing. This involved the mechanics of a cooldown paired with connecting it to the UI. Improved the map layout: I replaced the simple map with a better, larger layout with these neat medieval assets I found online that are public domain.  Improved the AI's path-finding ability: I added the use of an Environment Query System using Pathing Grids and looking for the Distance to the Flag or Play
Read more