Wake Up Devlog Week 18

Before anything else, a date being missing between week 17 and 18 isn’t a typo; my design lectures are now on Wednesdays rather than Tuesdays so I will now be starting each sprint on a Wednesday.

At this point, I was painfully aware of how over-ambitious I was with the sprints I set over the Christmas break, and how much this had placed me behind what I expected of myself. If I had been more realistic with my sprint planning, I would be prepared for this situation without any damaged morale, allowing development to progress more smoothly.

Regardless, this was the situation I found myself in and all I could do was make the best of it. Despite how negative I sounded towards myself there, development has actually gone well for the last few months, and I am somewhat surprised I have been able to achieve much of what I set out to do with so little in the way of setbacks, as I was a little concerned about this scope of the Project back in September.

Right now, I am happy I decided to push myself with this project and attempt to achieve so much, as this is by far the Project I am proudest of, and it really highlights how far I have come in the Year since I started learning Unreal Engine.

At this point, I had a decision to make. How was I going to reevaluate and adjust my Sprint / development Plan for the last few months.

When I really sat down to think about it, I had a majority of what I needed working for the Game mechanically there; I would only need a few small additions (Sequence to play at the start of the game, method of explaining objective to player, potentially in said sequence.)

In the doom and gloom of my thoughts of the last paragraph, I think I was being too harsh on myself, and expecting to create a full game when all that was required of me was a vertical slice. I was so concerned with more enemy, boss, and room variety, that I forgot that this is a vertical slice, and there was smoothing more important I needed to draw my focus towards… Polish!

As of now, I have been using asset packs for the models and animations of my player classes and enemies/bosses- however none of these fit the game, and would not be good fits for a release of a vertical slice, despite how well they have served me as placeholder assets.

With this realisation came another, that I needed to pivot my focus towards art and animation before it was too late.

I would need 3D models and animations for each of the Player classes I plan to implement; the enemies, and the bosses- as well as the environment.

Over Christmas I already had a lot of trouble rigging my Character model for the default Unreal Skeleton in Blender- I need to overcome that and fast. I know one of my classmates has experience using a paid Blender plugin for rigging with the default UE skeleton, so if I can’ get the free one I’ve been using to work, I might ask him to give me a hand.

I decided to still go ahead with my current sprint plan I had for this week, which was to Design and implement two new bosses and boss rooms- because as much as I need to pivot away from enemy / boss variety, I do need more than one boss.

Firstly, I designed the ‘Charger’ boss. This boss will have a slightly smaller boss room with lots of walls dividing it; and its attack pattern consists of it briefly setting and unsetting its focus on the player, before charger straight forward in that direction until it hits a wall, when it will re-focus and unfocus on the player and charge again for 10 seconds. When this 10 seconds is up, it will have a more basic behaviour pattern of chasing the player and attempting to use melee attacks on it for 8 seconds, before it begins charging again. DUring its charge phase, its move speed is doubled from 1500 m/s to 3000 m/s.

Previous Week

                                                                                                                             Next Week