Final Major Project Blog

This blog post will be one huge recap on everything that has happened in the creation of my game "little box of horrors" so far.

This recap stems back to the start of the project and allows me to formulate into structured paragraphs the writing I already have done on my Hack & Plan.

So the begin with:

Week 1:

This week was a lot of planning and teething in what direction I want the game to go in, I wanted to form a game that was more of a nod towards old 2008 call of duty world at war zombies but with my own elements in it. I finally grounded this idea with little box of horrors a first person wave based shooter that takes place in a child's toy box.

I put the groundwork for enemies, guns and environment into my GDD, this entailed what weapons I wanted to add, what type of enemies there are and how they act, finally accompanied by the environment.

This week also had a lot of revision into old toy guns from the 60's to try and gain some artistic direction for the overall appearance of the weapons.

Week 2: This week saw the end of my GDD's creation and finally put me at a point where I could start creating the game in unreal engine, I originally had planned to make all the in game environment myself and attempt to create weapons how I wanted them to look (The toy guns idea in week 1) however, this plan was snuffed out by my lack of ability to model well in 3DS max so as a compromise I decided to use assets off the unreal store for the guns and player. Well maintaining my own creative input in the form of environment creation which consists mainly of toys found around the map.

I started to regress into some bad habits with my work as I found myself struggling with documentation over actual game creation thus ending up with me feeling bogged down.

I spent a lot of this week learning how to use 3DS max better and finishing those environment aspects. The end of the week saw me with a modelled football, basketball, environment structures, a single pop gun for in game use, grenade and smoke grenade alongside some smaller structures.

Week 3:

This week came with many up's and downs as I started to with the main menu implementation of the game which was a success!.. or so I thought. At the time I had a working start function for the game on the main menu, a full separate instance level for the main menu alongside this I also had a full working options system which allows for the player to change various settings for game stability sake, LOD, texture quality, resolution and finally shadow quality alongside anti-aliasing. I also created a working game quit feature.

This section also had me screenshotting for placeholder images on the background of the menus. I also took this week to focus of finishing some minor unfinished documentation to do with in game audio as it had slipped my mind previously.

Week 4:

This week featured the creation of my in game pause system and the implementation of sound onto the menus, I also finished the creation of an ammo box for in game use as a dropped item by enemies.

The audio was added onto my settings with no issues, this was for when the user clicked or hovered over a button on the interface the same applied for the paused menu in game.

This week brought the beginning of my games creation struggles as I started to get bug I didn't know how to fix some of which are still hurting my project on week 10, those bugs consisted of the pause menu breaking and not showing the drop down box after trying to get the player pawn to work in junction with it, once I manged to get that to work the player movement broke with it, the player was able to go backwards, left and right but not forward it was almost like a boundary was pushing the player back and in some way it's linked to the menu/pause system.

I also carried on with my search to find a player model that wouldn't cost me which I successfully found with animations to be used alongside him.

Week 5: This week was a break for me as I went to visit family for personal reasons.

Week 6:

Coming back to the project after a break had the opposite affect to what I wanted as I came back to a broken game with no idea how to fix it, on the brighter side I found a weapon pack to be used for the low poly guns this features nearly everything I need fortunately.

I still couldn't find a fix for the bug that arose in week 4 so I looked past them for the time and tried to implement player animations on that player model I found, which then brought this issue of me not being able to use them with him regardless as the movement was broke, this all left me in a stressed out spot with the whole project so I looked to implementing the pre made unreal third person character which I then gave a first person camera to as it feels more like true first person when done in this manner.

but the player still suffered from the same bugs from before with the movement system not working correctly which wasn't down to my arrays for the movement of the player, I hadn't missed an input action in the blueprint for the movement and yet it wouldn't work.

I tried recreating the character fully which still didn't work which fully deduces to me that it was the menu/pause system breaking the game.

Week 7:

I took this week to create my tutorial levels environment and have something to work with in terms of direction. This week I added a credits function to the main menu where the correct commendations would be added for those who had input in the games creation this includes assets used off the unreal store.

Slow week with little to add for the game as I was starting to feel the pressure of not finishing the game and my lack of progress with this nail I'd hit.

Now: At current I'm still struggling with bugs in my game and hope to get them fixed or totally revamp my project but I will update this blog in two weeks with what has happened in the 8,9,10,11,12 weeks of the games creation.