Wake Up Devlog Week 14

   By this point, I was beginning to regret breaking my sprint plan; as I now felt incredibly unorganised in my workflow. While I did get a lot done this week, I am still concerned for how this is going to affect my workflow going forward. 

   Following my sprint plan strictly in the previous months, was helping me make steady and meaningful progress in a pre-planned order which was incredibly helpful for the development process, especially considering I have been working on this project alone. Getting this sprint plan back on track sooner rather than later could still save the project, but if I don’t act soon it could keep getting worse.

   Unfortunately, due to spiralling mental health and a lack of self-discipline, I continued working out of order. Despite this, however, I am happy with the work that I did do.

   I created some UI textures on Figma for menu buttons and borders, and began brushing up my incredibly basic Main Menu.

   I created a basic outline of how I wanted my various menus to look within Figma to plan out the layouts before working on them in full, which saved me some time in fiddling around after the fact.

   I had an idea previously for the Main menu, where it would initially be over a shot of the character looking off into a purple sun in a dark sky, and would pan across to be placed directly in front of the character when transitioning into the class select screen.

   I managed to create this relatively simply, using a blueprint with a camera component that would be possessed when starting the main menu sublevel, and has an instance-editable transform variable that can be moved with a 3D widget to adjust the position it will move to. I used a timeline to set the Camera’s location and rotation from the start to end point smoothly, and it made the main menu FAR more dynamic and engaging.

   Alongside this, I made a blueprint which consists of the character’s skeletal mesh for the camera to be panned around. This blueprint checks for the selected class in the game instance, and changes its mesh, materials, and animation depending on the selected class for the player to preview in the class select screen.

  I then laid out the Main Menu and class select screen according to the plan I had made in figma with the new button textures, and added a fade in / out animation to the widgets’ canvas panels, so they could ade in/out when opened. The main menu widget doesn't fade in when the game is initially opened, but does when moving back from the class select screen.

   My final addition to the main menu for this week was a start to the settings menu. The settings menu consists of a border with content that can be scrolled through, and three buttons at the top to switch between the active widget of a widget switcher for different setting menus (Key Bindings, Video Settings, Audio Settings). I created a basic control rebind button widget and added some to the key bind setting menu so that the player can rebind all their controls to their liking, making it more accessible for everyone, especially those who use specialised controllers due to a physical disability.

   The only control I’ve had trouble with rebinding is the camera movement, which I will need to look into.

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