iain-games-arcade

[iain-games-arcade]

Final Evaluation

What has gone well in this project? Over the last few weeks, I have learned a lot of new things about how Unreal Engine works, and I have even taught myself how to read and understand a lot of code I didn’t write myself. This was an extremely valuable learning experience, as it will make writing code in Unreal engine easier in the future, and can even be applied to normal coding too. 

Have you found new software? New tutorial sites? New ways of working? Although I haven’t found any new ways of learning anything, I did come to the decision that the Unreal Engine documentation was clearly written by the developers, rather than technical writers, and is therefore useless. I did start playing with a new bit of software called Bfxr, and although I didn’t do much with it, I did find it very intuitive and enjoyable to work with. 

Have you enjoyed anything about working in lockdown? I have enjoyed how working in lockdown has forced me to adapt and teach myself things that I otherwise would not have learned on my own. It made me feel much more independent and as though I was really making progress of my own accord. It was very exciting when I was struggling with a bug in my combat system and I took the time to carefully walk myself through the code, as I realised that I hadn’t fully understood what I’d been doing as I’d been mindlessly following a tutorial. Now I actually understand all the code I wrote because I painstakingly went through it all to find out where the issue was occurring. I’m also incredibly proud of how much of this I managed to do on my own without needing to go to the instructors because I was able to find the resources I needed to make things on my own. 

What could have gone better? I still don’t think I’m managing my time very well, as I sporadically make large amounts of progress of the course of twelve hour days with little to no breaks, and then spend two days achieving nothing because I feel terrible. I want to get better at balancing this out to working a reasonable amount ever day and making steady, consistent progress on everything. On top of that, I’m still absolutely terrible at graphic design and drawing things that look good. If I can wrap my head around that, I will definitely be on the road to making better final products.

Would being at college with our software and hardware helped? Has the open brief been harder or easier? Were you anxious due to the current situation or work? While individually, I found the open brief to be daunting and lockdown to be extremely stressful as I didn’t feel I had access to many of the resources I normally would, these problems seemed to cancel each other out. Because of lockdown, I didn’t have to make the full game, so if I could at least show where I would introduce the themes from the brief into the gameplay I had created, I could happily work away at the coding without worrying about the art assets, which I struggle with the most, and find that I prefer doing with a drawing tablet, which I don’t have access to at home. 

What are you planning to do in the future? I would like to keep working on this project because I still think I can learn more from it. I think if I can face the criticisms that other people, and I, have of it then I can learn more about how Unreal Engine works, and create a product I am much happier with. After that, I suppose I’ll see what the next project brief is, and I’ll start work on that. Between then and now, however, I would like to catch up on my more traditional programming projects, as well as video editing. 

Has this put you off from working at home in the future? Do you now want to work from home?  I think this has showed me that I am capable of working at home, but I unintentionally put things in place to make that harder for myself. I am perfectly capable of doing everything we do at college when I am at home, I just don’t push myself to because I’m not at college. However, I think that if I can push past those self imposed boundaries, I can become significantly more productive when working from home and create some really cool stuff in my off time. I think I probably put those in place because home and college feel like very different environments. At home, my computer is in my room, so I feel like I can either do the difficult but rewarding thing, or I can just chill out and not really put in the work. Whereas when I’m at college, I feel like I need to be making progress because I’m not in my room with my feet up on my desk and I can’t just get up and go make a coffee whenever I feel like it. It’s harder to get distracted. That being said, my focus isn’t an issue, the hard part is starting. Once I start, I usually don’t stop for a very long time because I get into the zone and find I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I just really struggle to actually start doing something like that. 

What software do you plan on using for your next project? Why? The next project I will definitely keep using Unreal Engine, as I am now really getting to grips with it and I think I can start creating more interesting and complicated stuff. What software I use to create assets very much depends on the style of game, because if it’s 3D, I’ll definitely want to use Maya, but if it’s 2D, photoshop is obviously the better route. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Feedback on my game

Link to my gameplay demo

Before I get into the feedback I’ve got from other people, I do have some things that I personally wasn’t pleased with in the game.  Firstly, the jumping controls felt weightless and floaty, which didn’t contrast well with the feeling I was going for with the combat. On top of that, there weren’t any reaction animations for getting hit, so there was never a sense that the combat was weighty, which isn’t particularly good. The audio was mixed terribly, and there was no background music, so the two guys were just yelling with nothing in the background, which was really unsettling. The way I set up multiplayer, using two instances of “Player Start” two spawn two instances of a BP_player mean that I couldn’t easily swap out the models being used, so the two characters looked identical. The placeholder models I used (which I chose because they also came with animations that I could use) obviously don’t fit with the theme of the project, nor are they pixel art.  However, I’m willing to accept much of that because I wanted to demonstrate that I could set up a fighting system with more than one player character, by myself. I’m less willing to accept that the combo system doesn’t time out at any point, so if you do the first attack, then wait ten seconds before doing the second, it doesn’t reset to attack animation 1, it just carries on as though you had the momentum of the first attack, which looks strange. I haven’t done much investigating on how to fix this, but I suspect it wouldn’t be too challenging. 

Feedback from other people: The jumping feels weightless, which means that if you jump to try and evade somebody, you’re waiting ages to come back down to earth.  The main issue is that the characters don’t react when they make contact with each other. The weapons just phase right through them. This could be mitigated or solved with physical reactions, be that the sword bouncing off, or the character physically recoiling.

[iain-games-arcade]

Weekly reflection

What has gone well in the past week? Over the past week, I’ve made a fair amount of progress in Unreal engine, and I’ve also taken a little bit of time to myself to focus on my mental health. As a result, I could approach my work more positively and calmly. I did my best to put less pressure on myself to do lots in a day and instead just did what I could. 

What could have gone better? I still feel like I could have done more. I ran up against a pretty big wall in Unreal engine when I massively overcomplicated my player system, which slowed me down a lot. I’m also having pretty continuous trouble with art assets, as I’m not a particularly good artist and as a result I am running up against a pretty big wall in the form of creating good looking sprites. I’ve been solving this by using placeholder assets I got for free off the asset store. 

What are you planning to do next week? Next week, I think I’m going to finish up making my combat system, so that I know it’s done and works well. Then I’ll get some feedback on how the game feels. From there I can make tweaks as necessary, and if I feel able to actually make some original art assets, I’ll do that too. I also want to create a landscape to make the arena a little more interesting. That should be pretty easy, but is also optional. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Polish

This morning I spent a little while trying to add a bit more polish to the player win screens. I, very obviously from this image, am not an expert at pixel art or graphic design, but I threw this together because it’s functional and at least matches the vibe I want to go for with my game. It’s also easier to read than the older versions because of the red background. I would like to create a short animation, so it sort of smashes into the screen Devil May Cry 5 style, so I’ll try and do that over the rest of the morning. 

The other bit of polish I added was using placeholder assets from the “Paragon: Greystone” asset pack. I used these because although they don’t fit the theme, they have premade animations and sounds that I could use. This was very helpful because I do not have the artistic skill to create my own art assets, especially without access to a drawing tablet. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Plan recording feedback

People will have to interact with the game to give feedback on it. This is because they’ll need to physically feel if movement and combat feel to light and floaty, or if it feels too slow and deliberate for some reason.

I will get people to give feedback on my work by either watching a gameplay video of it that I will make and put on YouTube, or I can probably see if I can make a file available for download from my website. I can also get family members to play it. 

I will collect the feedback through google forms, but I can probably also just get verbal feedback from family members.

[iain-games-arcade]

A theoretical problem

I don’t know how to upload a game to steam. That, personally, is the main roadblock in the way of getting a, hypothetically finished, game released on steam. That being said, I don’t get the impression it would be hard. I believe you have to set up an account with Steam Direct. I would probably read some Steam Direct documentation to get a better idea of what I would need to prepare beforehand. I think you also need to pay a fee of something like £100 to release a game onto the steam marketplace. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Solved Problem

The main problem I have been encountering for about 3 days now has been my health system not working. It transpired that in trying to solve other issues, which still remain unsolved, I had overcomplicated my player system to have two different player blueprints, when I only needed one, and a couple of other issues. I sat down with my dad, and together we worked through everything and cut it all down and fixed the issues. 

When I started out, the Player 2 health bar wouldn’t fill with colour and wouldn’t change as it needed to. As time went on it became apparent that it’s because both instances of the “Player start” module were calling BP_Player1 when one of them should have been calling Player 2. So I deleted BP_Player2 and tidied up the code in Player 1, moving the check if a player’s health was at zero to the Gamemode. This made things substantially easier.

Setting the screen for who wins based on health

Health bar grabbing the numbers so it knows the percentage of health left

Creating the healthbar widget and dropping health on button input in the Player character.

Final result

[iain-games-arcade]

Playlist week 4

This week I finally got around to playing Street Fighter 5 for a couple of hours. This was very helpful, as I realised that the animations I had been trying to create in photoshop were nowhere near snappy enough. The animations in Street Fighter 5 take something like 3 frames to go off, and a lot of the motion is concealed with visual effects. I plan to use both of these things in my game to 

A) give me a little bit of leeway in creating animations that look good despite my lack of artistic skills B) I need to make my animations shorter. All that being said I rather enjoyed my time with Street Fighter. I’ve never been the type of person to sink hundreds of hours into getting really good at fighting games, but in spite of this, after a couple of minutes getting the hang of the controls, I still had a surprising amount of fun punching up an AI opponnent.

Other than that, exactly the same music, a couple more episodes of Better Call Saul and some Minecraft. Not particularly exciting or helpful to my project.

[iain-games-arcade]

Test making something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_6-JYnU8aA&feature=youtu.be

This week I actually did manage to make something. I made a test of local multiplayer in Unreal Engine. The next thing I’m going to do is create some placeholder assets that are basically just rectangles that change colour when certain requirements are met. This is how I’m going to test for contextual inputs, for example, analogue stick is up AND the attack button is pressed means “play the animation for an upward attack.” Just simple things like that. Then I can create some actual art assets with actual animations. I’m also going to have to work on health bars and win/lose states. Especially seeing as that’s part of the blog posts for this week, which I haven’t done.

[iain-games-arcade]

Weekly reflection

What has gone well in the past week? This week I feel like I’ve made more progress on my game than I managed to last week, but that’s because I did better at getting up at a more reasonable time and managing my time better. I got distracted less and focussed more on the important things.

What could have gone better? There were a few things I was very disappointed in myself for, the first and foremost of which being that I didn’t do any practice of pixel art techniques because I was too busy trying to learn how to make the camera work in Unreal. I also haven’t yet had a good stint with any fighting games, so I still don’t know exactly how I want my game to feel, but I do have a little bit of experience in the field, and therefore at least a vague idea of how I want it to play. 

What are you planning to do next week? Next week I want to do more with the pixel art, so that I can tick off an older blog post, and I want to set up a win and loss state. I expect this to take me all week. I also want to try and play with creating sound assets. I genuinely have no idea how long that is going to take me though.

[iain-games-arcade]

Implementing my win and lose state

I have implemented a basic win/lose state in my game. Currently, player health can only be reduced by pressing a button on the controller, but when a player’s health reaches zero, a win screen is brought up for a few seconds before the game ends. I just created a placeholder asset for testing purposes, and it works. 

This was fairly straightforward to implement because we’ve done it all before on earlier projects.

[iain-games-arcade]

Discussing win and lose states

The way you win the game is by reducing your enemies health bar to zero. This will usher in a screen that says “player 1/2 wins” accordingly. I think that’s pleasantly simple and fitting with the simplicity of an arcade fighting game. 

My actual plan hasn’t changed with lockdown, however I haven’t been able to get on with it as soon as I perhaps would have liked because of Lockdown.

[iain-games-arcade]

Presenting my outcome

I will be presenting gameplay of my game on YouTube. However, it’s possible that I will be able to make it available for download on my website, depending on the type of hosting I payed for. 

As of right now, there is a minimum number of players, and that’s two. However, if I spend the time working out how to program a baseline AI, I could have a player vs CPU mode.

[iain-games-arcade]

Audience Needs

A computer that can run basic pixel art.

At least two Xbox controllers, but PS3 and PS4 controllers should work too.

I doubt the players will expect a leader board, seeing as it’s a fighting game, and so is about beating your opponent, rather than getting a high score. 

The players may expect something to outline the controls, as that will not be done in a match. Perhaps that will be on the main menu. 

The players will expect clear indication of who is player one and who is player two. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Week 3 Playlist

This week, I have taken in very little media. I listened to the same couple of CD’s and playlists as I did last week, so rock and metal. This week, I moved more into rock than metal. I listened to the album “How to make friends and influence people” by Terrorvision a couple of times, which is a very good album, but more punk than the style of music I think I want in my game. 

Other than that, I haven’t been able to consume much content, much less the content I wanted to consume, like playing Street Fighter.

[iain-games-arcade]

Weekly reflection

What has gone well in the past week? I feel like I was able to think carefully about my blog posts, and wind up to start working on making the game next week and effectively make a plan for that. I also feel like I was able to write a good amount in the blog posts I’ve done over the past few days.

What could have gone better? I don’t feel like I managed my time as well as I could, and would write something on my blog and then get distracted for an hour and a half watching something on YouTube or playing a game or something. This made me feel really terrible because it felt like I was cheating myself of the feeling of achievement I get when I can say with honesty that I finished my work. As a result, I’m going to have to spend some time finishing my work over the next couple of days, which will cut into my time for relaxing, or even cut into my time for working in Photoshop and Unreal next week. 

What are you planning to do next week? Primarily manage my time better. I feel if I can make a better plan at the beginning of the week and be more disciplined with how I spend my time, I’d be able to make more progress next week. 

[iain-games-arcade]

Testing making something

Test your development, you should be striving to learn and create something new so will never have done this before, even if its only one new aspect. What is it you are doing new? How long did the test take? Was it easier or hard than thought? Show results.

Over the next few days, I want to learn more about how to do pixel art and pixel art animation. Although I have done a bit of this before, I’ve mostly avoided it because I know I’m not very good at it. I feel if I can learn to do it better and more efficiently, I should be able to create better products in the long run. 

[not to self - update this with finished work]