finalmajorprojectyear2kv

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Final Outcome

Images

Video

itch.io

I created my itch.io page and themed it around my settings menus, I really like this and think it goes with the games theming.

Evaluation

I think that the end product is amazing, and it met all the points that I wanted in my initial proposal. I am still not perfectly happy with the hover bike movement system, but I feel that it is in a better place after the drifting changes.

There is definetely many improvements that can be made, highlighted in the playtest. The changes I most want to see are a quick retry key, a retry key in the leaderboard submit and the stats for the bikes actually working.

Overall I am very happy with the end product, especially the UI / Main Menu which I think is the highlight.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Issues When Building

When trying to build my game, so that I could publish it to itch.io, I was getting an unknown error. Jake helped me in trying to figure out why.

We tried putting it on the :D drive incase that was the issue, which didn't work.

We tried removing the leaderboard plugin because there was stuff in the output log to do with it, which didn't work.

We tried a different computer, which didn't work.

We tried moving all the stuff over to new levels, which also didn't work.

Chris came over and saw the output spitting out an error to do with the icon. So I reconverted my .png into a .ico and uploaded it, which worked.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Photoshop - Icons & Banners

My game needs an Icon for the taskbar and desktop, and a banner for when the game is loading. I created the icon based off the computor you access the settings menus with, and the bike off the tracer bike. I chose these as they are iconic parts of the game, which are very recognisable.

Icon

Banner

Overall I am really happy with the end result, and think they are really identifiable.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Timer Display

I realised that this whole time I had no way to see my current time when racing. So I quickly created this timer layout in the style of my computer UI.

I just get the current time and display it using a binding. This works and allows for the player to see their time after the game is built.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Daily Target - 02/05/2025

Trello

Today is the last day of in college development work and I only have a few things left on my list (as well as some other things to do). The main important thing is finishing up the course and online leaderboard integration, this means having the checkpoints spawn in and the player able to submit their time. This shouldn't be too difficult as it is all set up in an easy way.

Sounds & Music would be the next most important thing. As my focus is on the UI I will get sounds and music for this only and if I get time at the end of the day I will add some to the game level.

Adding in some more objects to the main menu environment will help make it feel more lived in and sell the mechanic / garage style.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Daily Review - 01/05/25

Daily Review

Today I was able to finish the track selection UI which completes all four UI elements of my main menu. The environments are also all up to good standard ; more decoration could be done tomorrow if I have the time.

I was also able to migrate over a sample map, create the text-to-speech & force feedback systems, fix a few bugs and even add drifting to my vehicle movement.

I also had Harrison asking to play my game ; although I didn't have a feedback form for him to fill out he said that the vehicle movement felt really nice. This is reassuring that the small amount of work that I did may have helped contribute to this.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Menu Feedback Results

Most people preferred using keyboard and mouse to navigate the menus, this is may be more down to personal preference than to my menus but it is something to consider.

Almost all my UI communicates that their elements are in a hovered or pressed state really well ; except the track select screen. This may be down to how it only turns slightly less translucent when hovered, I will definitely improve this.

Most people this the environment around the UI isn't distracting which is great. This definitely gives me some room to add more to the environments, while trying my best at making the other two slightly less distracting while not making them less interesting.

Most people also felt the camera's transitioning speed was fine, with a single person thinking it was a little slow. I could tweak it by a 100 milliseconds or so to make it slightly faster.

Overall I think that my UI styles and environment are well recieved with little to improve upon ; the main thing being how the track select presents it's hover and press states to the player.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Drift & Gradual Acceleration

Although I have a focus on UI I couldn't help but think how easy it would be to add drifting and gradual acceleration to the bike. This would make the turns feel a lot smoother and the bike not giving you whiplash.

My drifting is done by removing power from my lateral stabiliser based on the steering action value. With the default lateral power amount it prevents the bike from sliding left or right by providing an equal opposite force ; lowering the power means that we don't have an equal force and will slide slightly.

Gradual acceleration will make the bike feel more like a real vehicle (the current bike instantly accelerates to it's target speed). This is also quite simple as we slowly allow more of the acceleration to be applied over time by using a time line.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Force Feedback & TTS Bug

The text-to-speech (and by extension the force feedback) for the vehicle select is constantly firing. This needs to not happen as the force feedback stacks on top of each other, amplifying it's strength.

After some debugging I found that the variable was not being saved, this is because the text-to-speech function saves it as a local variable (only done in the vehicle select). Local Variables aren't saved for future use by the function so it will always do the text-to-speech because it doesn't know what the last spoken name was.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Force Feedback

I wanted to have force feedback for when the player moves through my UI, it is an accessibility feature that can help visually impaired know they have selected a different UI component.

I quite simply used a apply force feedback node whenever my text-to-speech fires as well. This means that I have to do no additional logic and it will only fire once (TTS doesn't say the same thing twice).

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Adjusting the Map to the Target Audience

The asset pack I used for the environment / map is created to be used by loads of types of games, because of this the asset pack has gun, drug and body models for a more mature game.

My target audience is the kids and teens range so it needs to be around PEGI 7. PEGI 7 does not allow for references to drugs or 'realistic' weapons (it would make it a PEGI 16), so if I want to maintain a PEGI 7 I need to remove these.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Camera Selector Bug

Currently you can press the start button and quickly press it again moving you past the vehicle select and straight to the track select. This is done because it increments twice, therefore moving the camera along two positions.

The fix is quite simple ; add in a do once after the increment and decrement events and only reset them once the camera has finished blending (transitioning) to the next selector.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Vehicle Widget Change

While Cory was talking to me I was testing my UI, he saw it and said that I should have the hover style of the back button the same as the others for consistency.

I agree with him that the consistency is nice, and it makes it much more obvious you have it selected.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Implementing the Map

I took the sample map from the asset pack that I used for the UI environment, removing all the cars, people and interiors of buildings. I also removed all the extra lighting to help with performance (these were almost all indoors anyway).

I also removed a few trees in these areas to make it so the player doesn't have to thread the needle between them during the race. Although something like that would add some difficulty to the race, my vehicle movement can sometimes freak out when you hit things at speed.

I also removed collision of all the fences and miscellaneous 'clutter' items, like sign posts or fire hydrants. I did this because they really add to the environment but can really get in the way of the race and freak out the vehicle movement ; I would rather you can move through a few environmental objects than send the bike into the stratosphere.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Text-To-Speech

Using the same text-to-speech plugin as my last project (alternate controllers) I am able to easily add in a plugin that can read text. I can then make the plugin say whatever text I want whenever a button is hovered, which is what I did in my last project.

The difficulty comes from having controller support, as controllers never put buttons into a 'hovered' state and instead into a focused state. This means that instead of just on hovered I also need to check if the button is in focus.

I also don't want two things being said by the text-to-speech system, which happened in the last project. This should be an easy fix as each different button used a seperate speech channel last time. If they only had one channel it would stop whatever one is being spoken when the new one is started.

As my logic also runs every tick it would try saying to do the text to speech every tick as well ; I have additional logic that prevents this by checking if the current thing attempting to be said is the same as the last thing that was said.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Unreal - Track Select UI Style

To recreate the track outline, like the ones you see on F1 trach posters I needed an ariel view of the map to trace over in photoshop.

This is the picture I got. It is a little difficult to see what is going on, especially with all the cars and people in the roads. These will be gone in the final version of the map, as well as all the house interiors as the player will not be able to drive into the houses.

Using the pen tool, which allows you to add points and then adjust the tangents to get smooth curves, I traced over two little loops of the map.

Track one has a few little turns, but mainly boasts it's straight sections allowing you to get high speeds and be very beginner friendly.

Track two on the other hand has a few more tighter turns while still having some straights allowing players to still get some higher speeds.

The two tracks are designed in opposite meaning that you can't just use the same vehicle, and it's statistics, for both tracks. This incentivises players to switch up vehicles to get better times.

Placing them both on a black background, like the track posters, really makes them pop and lets you see them a bit better. I'm also using white on black as my other posters on the trophy wall have black backgrounds, so it is just to fit in with them (it also looks a lot nicer with white on black).

This is what it looks like when I import it and place it onto the pre-existing temporary widget I had made. This is getting somewhere but there is definitely adjustments that need to be to all the position of everything.

I also want the track to be a little bit thicker so I will do that before I re-adjust my layout.

I made the outline of the track much thicker by just applying an outline to the track in photoshop. I also started with this layout but I really don't like it. I think the title is too far from the top and I don't like the buttons.

I have this version, which is very similar to the first, which I like. I moved the buttons to be either side of the title which I think looks much better than either side of the track outline. I do think the title is a little high from the top, and I still need to add a select button so I will do that next.

This is the final draft version (right) for now which is so much better than the original version (left). I'm definitely not happy with the outline of the tracks but that is down to my lack of photoshop skills unfortunately. If I have time near the end of my project I might redo them to get them looking nicer.

[finalmajorprojectyear2kv]

Daily Target - 01/05/2025

With two days left of development I really need to finish up my UI, the main focus of my project. The last one I need to finish is the track select (the top three times are already finished).

After that I will also need to import over the sample map from my asset pack which I plan to use for my map, which is the one I will be drawing over for my track select.

With the rest of the time today I would like to finish up the force feedback and text-to-speech code, hopefully in a way that can either be used by all the widgets or quickly copied over to all the widgets.

If I have additional time I will continue working on the virtual keyboard, getting it smoothly working with the online leaderboard and only showing when the player is using a controller.