Wake Up Devlog Week 15

Well- seasonal blues hits hard and this week was also incredibly unorganized. At the very least I have been outputting some work rather than nothing during this time, but I grow over-concerned at my lack of organized work effort.

   The first thing I did this week was add more atmosphere (literally) to my persistent level. Using Unreal Engine’s Directional Light, atmospheric cloud and atmospheric fog tools, I created an unnatural-looking sky in the Game’s persistent level. 

   The sky now consists of a Purple Sun in a black sky with glitchy clouds, which makes the Game look far more interesting than it did with just a black void in the sky.

   Alongside polishing the visuals of the Game, I added some more information for the Player. I created a Widget to hold Character Skill information, to be placed on the class select screen.

   This widget has an instance editable enum to differentiate what skill it is meant to display (Primary, Secondary, Utility, Special)

   The Player Character base has four structs which hold a texture and two text variables, which the aforementioned widget uses to get the icon, name and description of each skill.

After this, I decided to upgrade my enemies from being plain cubes, to having actual models. While I plan to hopefully create my own basic models for enemies eventually, for now, I am using an asset pack which doesn’t quite fit my game in the meantime.

   With this addition, I found a problem with my attack system, it wasn’t synced to any animation.

   To rectify this, I created an anim notify for spanning an enemy attack / projectile to add to their attack animation montages. This allowed me to sync my enemies’ attacks to their animations. 

   During this week, I unfortunately had a lot of trouble with animation. I used a free low-poly female model as a base to model clothing onto for the Bearer of Wrath player class, and attempted to rig the UE base skeleton to it using a free Blender plugin- however, when importing the FBX to Unreal Engine, the skeleton was not properly rigged and the animations would not play at all. I used a video guide to use this plugin, and I had followed each step exactly, so I was very confused as to why this wasn’t working.

   I decided to come back to this later, as it was giving me a lot of unnecessary stress, and I will be able to receive more help from my peers / lecturers with this when I’m back in University.

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