Wake Up Devlog Week 21

I started this week by finally implementing the Bearer of Wrath model I created in prior weeks. I used Mixamo to get some placeholder animations, as I don’t have the time to rig and create decent quality animations on my own, as art is somewhat of a weak point of mine. Mixamo makes the process of implementing placeholder animations quick and easy (although obviously you cannot get animations that are great for your project; but again, good as placeholders).

After implementing these animations and creating an anim blueprint, I noticed something while testing; when looking up at flying enemies, the Player’s view is obstructed by the Player mesh, making fighting these enemies very annoying. This was something that wasn’t pointed out by any of the Playtesters and I had never noticed until now.

To rectify this, I moved the spring arm component 50 units to the right, giving the game a slightly more over-the-shoulder POV. On top of rectifying the issue of the Player’s view being blocked when looking up, this also aligned the camera more with the projectile spawn point, making the trajectory of projectiles feel a lot better.

When I got one of my lecturers to playtest the Game, I noticed that they expected the binding for skipping dialogue to be the left mouse button rather than E. To communicate this to the player, I added a UI element which consists of a border encasing the letter E, which fades in and out when the current section of dialogue has finished typing.

The rest of this week was spent preparing for the Game to be shown at the Guildford Games Festival on the 14th February. This started with fixing a major issue I was having with Wwise.

When making a build of the game and trying to run it, there would be an error message about the Wwise plugin not being packaged correctly. After some troubleshooting, I found that in order for an Unreal Project to generate a solution file, it has to have a C++ class in the project; and without this solution file, Wwise can sometimes have issues packaging. It was not long before the GG fest when we fixed this issue, so unfortunately not much time to brush things up further before.

In terms of the things I did brush up before GG; I fixed the audio kinetic component on the audio player’s obstruction refresh rate to 0.0, so that the BGM was no longer obstructed by objects in the scene.

I also added indicators underneath each skill icon, displaying what button each is bound to. I added a function which detects if the skill is bound to LMB, RMB or space bar, and abbreviates each to ‘LMB’ ‘RMB’ and ‘SPC’ respectively; as one of my playtesters reported having to check their skill bindings constantly.

I also added a float track that makes the Bearer of Ambition’s primary projectile gradually get smaller over time, to communicate that its power goes down over greater distances.

Finally, I added a QR code for my and my composer’s link trees for people at GG to scan and follow our social media. Unfortunately, we were not able to get tickets for the event through our university, so could not be there on the day.

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