lukparkeru5

[lukparkeru5]

Final Evaluation

Overall, I believe this project was a great learning experience, but admittedly disappointing. While not having a completed game isn’t inherently a bad thing, my game is not quite in a playable state, not even having a single level. The lack of art assets and low amount of audio assets is simply a cherry on top. My plan of an RPG with two distinct endings didn’t even get to the RP, let alone the G.

Despite the disastrous result I got, the project itself was still quite fruitful. The large variety of new concepts was highly helpful, and will definitely improve any games I work on in the future. From horizontal/ vertical boxes in widgets, to actually using functions (I was aware of them prior, but never have I used them as much as I did in this project), using possession actively, rather than having a single actor that did everything, getting a player to input their name, as well as having reactions for specific names via substring. I also learnt plenty about how to implement graphs into unreal engine by downloading the file as a CSV and making a struct to tell unreal engine what all the values mean. While my story concept did not reach anywhere near the point I’d have liked it to, there is certainly a possibility of reusing it

By far the best thing I did this project however was the text engine, using for loops of a string turned into an array, proceeding to add each letter one at a time with a delay, along with sfx. The way of handling portraits and different sound effects was there is I wanted it too, I just needed to actually have the assets to set it up. The way I handled writing the players name in the engine (using a $ sign, since I’d be using £ to represent money anyways) was also quite satisfying, letting me use a single character to represent a much larger set of characters, whilst also not overlapping with anything else I’d potentially want to write. Should I attempt to do this project again, I think I would have the enemy and allies just two seperate blueprints, rather than using child classes. This would let me have all their stats actually in their blueprints, rather than just on tags, and would make things so much easier to calculate. In addition, it would be much easier to cast to them, since it would always be the same blueprint. Should I do this again, I would also like to improve the dialogue engine, making it so that the player’s name is printed one letter at a time (by making the $ actually add onto the array, rather than printing at once) and remove the delay and sfx for spaces, which could be done by checking the contents of each character, and skipping the delay and sfx when a space is detected In the end, while the product for this project was arguable one of the worst I’ve ever made, the knowledge I’ve learned made this a fruitful project regardless. Next project, I’d like to reuse the concepts I made storywise, perhaps keeping the player being able to switch between three distinct characters with their own abilities, maybe a 2d top down game like zelda, where you can switch characters on the fly to suit the situation? This would mesh well with my plan for corrupting the player’s healer friend kendall too, since they could eventually change from having healing abilities and medium damage resistances to low damage resistances and high damage, like a glass cannon. Potentially, the trio could be: Player, tank with defensive abilities Sharle (or any other name) mage with long ranged attacking abilities and crowd control Kendall (or other), a healer with abilities to heal the player, along with buffs . Or a low range high damage glass cannon if the player makes them kill many enemies. The player’s three characters would share a health bar, but their inherent resistances to damage would be different. This concept seems slightly easier than the turn based game, but would still allow me to use much of what I learned.  Overall, this project was a decent stepping stone to new projects, what I learned about text engines and scripts will be highly useful for future projects, and the concepts of multiple characters played by the same player is always a fun idea to play around with.

[lukparkeru5]

Gameplay video

I recorded and uploaded a gameplay video of my game here: https://youtu.be/_XpiRGJlASM suffice to say, this is distinctly less polished than most of my other games. While the game definitely has some bugs, the only one shown in the video is when an enemy gets shown as being dead when they have 1 hp. the left orb shown before the fight replenishes the party's health and mana, although the other party members that aren't bob have such high mana levels its not even noticable. Many of the abilities seen have not been implemented, but it wouldn't be too difficult to add more, since most of the basics have been made. The "item" command was not implemented, but would be similar to skills so not difficult. Last but not least there is the swap command, which allows the selected allies to swap places, from the vanguard to foreguard position. Vanguard gives attack, magic defence and speed, foreguard gives magic, defence and reduced speed. Where a character is determines some of what they can do, from AOE spells targetting specific rows to defences. In addition, the game can be downloaded here https://lukiopool.itch.io/rpgee if it asks for a password, input “westsuffolkcollege” (no quotation marks or spaces)

[lukparkeru5]

Last minute additions

Today is mostly about recording what I have done, as well as writing my evaluation. There are a few fairly major bugs I managed to iron out however

Finally, my rotation isn’t scuffed!

[lukparkeru5]

Yesterdays notes

Once again I forgot to post my notes, so here they are

[lukparkeru5]

Horizontal boxes

Widgets in unreal engine are a fickle thing, using anchors to allow them to work regardless of screen ratio. This does not always work how you’d like it to however, as it applies limits on how you can size said component. When you have problems like this, you can use a horizontal (or vertical) Box.

By placing all the required components into a horizontal (or vertical) box, you can determine how much of an area each component uses, as well as adding gaps to each, you can provide perfect hud placement regardless of aspect ratio. This is a highly useful thing to know, and I wish I knew it sooner. Regardless, it solves my current problem of health bars overlapping due to aspect ratio

[lukparkeru5]

Notes for the day

I’m quite happy with what I managed to do, despite the glitches

[lukparkeru5]

Implementing skills

To make it easier to implement skills in the future, I wrote some notes for myself, I decided posting them to the blog would be a good idea

The notes mostly go through where all of the commands are found, as well as exactly how to set the general parts up

[lukparkeru5]

Reduced blog posts

Due to me writing most of my activities down off of tumblr, I stopped writing blog posts for the most part, I’m not sure if that’s good thing or not since I have been posting my write ups at the end of each day. I’ve decided to continue just posting the write ups, but should I need better posts in the future, the write ups will be a good basis

[lukparkeru5]

Making a heal point

While this is currently a test actor, this will probably later get used for save points, which will heal the party

-All I need to do to heal the party is set their health the their health stat

[lukparkeru5]

I forgot to post the notes last time, so here they are

Overall, the day was spent restructuring a lot of things so they could work better with other systems, beginning to add skills and adding some functionality for multiple fights

[lukparkeru5]

Notes for the day

I recently began taking notes of all the activities I did in the day, here is todays.

[lukparkeru5]

implementing position swapping

Position swapping requires just two things, swapping the coordinates for both the characters in question, and swapping their position booleans. This is easily done with everything that I’ve already implemented, from targetting systems to ways to access one sheet from another

- The function code, which does the heavy lifting. The selection code I worked on earlier decides when this function is called, then it swaps the characters

[lukparkeru5]

Bug quashing: mistakes

When I loaded up my game this morning, it was very obvious something was wrong, since the game would crash at the start of any combat. I eventually found this to be because the enemy blueprint was failing to find any target, a direct result of me changing how I ordered my tags. Enemies have their faction on tag 8, players have it on tag 9, which suffice to say was a problem. To fix this, I made all the player actors have PLY in all caps at the end of their name, then if the target has that, to check a different tag

Now it works again

[lukparkeru5]

Weekly evaluation

This week was A LOT of work on the combat engine, and while I only managed to complete a single one of the 4 combat options the player should have, I believe that I have done quite well this week. Most of the stuff that I worked on for the “fight” option will be reused for the rest of the options, from selection, to speed calculating to vanguard/ foreguard, to ending turn, all of it can be used for the rest of the options. The only real basic thing I still need to implement is hp being consistent from one fight to another, rather than healing to full after each encounter (although that is still a valid option). In addition I have not done much testing to see if I somehow broke my level up code somewhere, but that will have to wait. For next week, I’d like to implement the swap mechanic, preferably in a day, as well as get started on or finish the “skill” option.  For skill option, it’ll work by checking the player’s known skills, an array for each character, and then giving them those options to select from. All skills will already be a function in CombatPlayer, regardless of what character they’re intended for, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement. For adding player current health compared to maximum, I imagine simply having another set of variables in Game Instance which saves current health at the end of combat, and then having the CombatPlayer’s cast to game instance and set their health to that instead of max health should do it. Before any of that though, I want to make it so if all the player’s characters reach 0 hit points, that they die and reset to a checkpoint (just an “open level” for now until a proper save system is added)

[lukparkeru5]

Writing what I’m actually doing

I’ve experienced quite a bit recently where I don’t actually remember what a variable is for, or I’ll mess with the wrong bit of code, leading to breaking something. To help remedy this somewhat I am now going to begin writing every goal I complete into the Blueprint GameInstanceForFightingAndCombatsAndSuch (shortened to game instance) I’m choosing to write there since it has no code of its own, since it is a game instance I’m choosing to write it all there instead of tumblr because its easier to edit than a tumblr post, and because most of it is notes for myself that do not otherwise need to be talked about

[lukparkeru5]

Adding health bars to enemies

Enemies now have a new tag, being their max health which is used for health bars (and maybe some spells later?) So I made health bars for enemies, as well as making it so health bars for both the enemies and friendlies don’t appear if there is no enemy there

[lukparkeru5]

Testing, players randomly healing?

I had an issue where it seemed as if my players were gaining health for no reason. Since I did not have a bar set up yet, I was simply going off the numbers printed on the top left via print string. After a LOT of fiddling about, I realised the cause of the issue: Nothing to do with their health level, the character’s healths were just swapping, so I was switching between looking at the tanks health and the mage, who has much less health.  On the bright side, I realised there was a bug where the enemies were dealing negative damage, so I managed to patch that!