TL:DR: Got a bit too ambitious with level design, got burned out and missed the deadline. Nonetheless, learned a bunch during the 3ish days I had to work on the game. I didn’t want to take too many shortcuts so 3rd party asset usage was minimal. (See video at bottom.) Here’s a few things I […]
TL;DR: Added terrain materials, a cave and tweaked the player controls. Finally got comfortable with basic terrain material blending. Added rock and some subtle melted snow in some areas. Made a cave in Blender and improved my manual UV unwrapping skills., though I try to avoid it when possible. Found a nice minimalistic untextured cabin […]
TL;DR: Putting aside other projects temporarily to work on the UE4 winter game jam. Got a basic snow sport game up and running. Used physics simulation + impulse forces for movement. Experimenting with the camera locked towards one direction for both simplicity and as an interesting constraint. It’ll allow me to focus the level design […]
TL;DR: Added 3D radar and dashboard mesh. It’s slowly starting to look like an actual cockpit. I’m opting for a holographic user interface since there’s more flexibility in where to place the indicators. Overall, I want to ensure that everything looks great from a geometry and lighting standpoint before moving onto the materials. Currently looking […]
TL;DR: Added missile lock reticules and self guided missiles to go alongside the machine gun. From a programming standpoint, it’s interesting contemplating how to go about implementing these features. It seems like treating every sufficiently complex entity as an individual blueprint is the way to go. In this case, a blueprint was created for the […]
TL;DR: Further focusing on enhanced cockpit experience. Added machine gun muzzle flash, laser, sound, impact effect and embark transition. Experimenting with AI health correlating with aggressiveness: Carnage: I’m generally doing things the “right way” now. Proper animation handling, performance considerations, as well as overall synchronization of logic and visual cues. Getting visual and tactile feedback […]
TL;DR: Added IK rigging + walk and run animations in Blender, then used a 1D blendspace in UE4 to blend them according to character speed. Blender’s Auto IK worked fine for quick tests, but didn’t give quite the desired results. Turned out I only needed to have one IK handle per leg- then set the […]
TL;DR: Rigged the model in Blender, miraculously imported it properly into UE4 and played my first in-engine custom animation. Blender has some really esoteric UI elements, mysterious buttons, and the list goes on. Between “NLA strips” and “Orphan Data”, the animation aspect of Blender can be pretty intimidating. Additionally, there’s an infamous Blender/UE4 import bug […]
TL;DR: Took another jab at the mech model after looking at some references. In Blender, I started using the subdivision surface modifier as an integral part of the modeling process, setting the crease strength of individual edges to differentiate between sharp and smooth edges. The SubD modifier pretty much doesn’t work well unless your topology […]
TL;DR: Finally put together a video of some pre-alpha gameplay footage. I’m super-duper stoked to see all the pieces come together. So far, it has all boiled down to the following parts: Environment modeling/lighting Cockpit modeling AI behavior Sound effects Next up, I’m giving enemy AI the ability to attack and adding a mission objective.