Final Major Project Blog 2

Week 8 & 9:

During this week my computer unfortunately broke and had a lot of issues which hindered my work on my fmp. The windows had corrupted itself and my peripheral drivers had all corrupted as well so it was basically not usable.

Week 10:

This week I got my new computer and was able to continue working on my project. I chose to scrap the tutorial level but kept a lot of blueprints I'd made for it and moved them into a 2nd level which is now the main 1st level of the game. I'm prioritising the blueprinting and layout of this level first before I progress into making the other 1 or 2 levels depending on time as I can just re-use the same blueprints from the current level. In this week I came back with a vengeance which led me to finish my character animations which included running, idling, weapon idling, adsing, crouching, and allowed me to input more actions onto my player which included the ads function, the secondary camera on the ads feature instead of using the main first person camera and the reload function for the gun. I also did further research into fixing animations that felt a bit janky and was able to correct these problems on my own animations through what I'd found. Finally in this week, I searched down assets for my enemy.

Week 11:

Continuing from where I left off last week I went on to try and implement an enemy character originally trying to keep with the theme of the toy box, which meant they were supposed to be toys, but in the end the model I had of a teddy bear which I tried to animate had too many issues primarily with sizing and animation loops which would've taken more time than necessary for an enemy character to fix. So instead I used an unreal marketplace store asset of a stylised cartoon zombie which still kept with the same theme I was aiming for. This asset also allowed me to cut down time as it came with pre-made animations for idling, running, attacking and dying. On top of this, I also implemented a reload animation for the players main starting weapon and made some adjustments to make the weapon feel more immersive in the form of sound and fixing the alignment with the bullet projectiles. I also made some adjustments with the level where I removed the spawn zones that were going to be for the enemies which allowed me to expand the first starting room. Instead of having zombies in spawn zones I'm going to try and have them spawn near to the player's location.

Week 12:

With my player character primarily finished, I could now focus on the weapons in my game. This turned out to be a bigger task than I expected due to how I had set up the player previously. Upon looking into it, I had found that making a weapon cycle system from the start is much more practical than trying to add one later on. So instead I had to revert my decision to have multiple weapons and as of now I have cut it down to two primary weapons and the grenades, which removes 3 weapons I'd previously planned to include. As I continued to work on the weapons, I discovered it was difficult to have the two different ammo types for different weapons attached to the player. Finally, I decided that the shotgun would be the 2nd weapon I implement. To begin I started with the blueprint for picking up the weapon from the floor where it floats above and you walk over it which then equips it to the player. I also made some adjustments to the HUD which were icons for the active weapon and an input message and sound effect to show the player that they picked up a new weapon. I made some collision box adjustments to objects in my level, such as the tank meshes in the starting room. With the removal of the other guns I made some adjustments to the aesthetics around the map.

Week 13:

This week started the task of enemy AI which I knew was going to be long and difficult from the start. Before I took this task on I had some final adjustments to make to the 2nd weapon such as the fire rate, the sound effect, the ammo count and reserve ammo, the reload time, etc. I made a separate blueprint for the shotgun shell which is a child blueprint to the parent which was the ak-47 as this allowed me to easily duplicate the code from the parent onto the child. After making some adjustments to the child blueprint and changing the mesh for the projectile, I had a working shotgun shell. I am currently unable to make the shotgun fire as if it's a non-automatic weapon, I am aware this requires time events but I am leaving it as a side task so I can prioritise on the enemy AI which is more important at the moment.

Week 14:

As we approach the deadline I have found myself primarily focussing on the enemy AI and in this week so far I've managed to get a functioning enemy with it's own vision peripherals that also were used to track the player's location. Upon having problems with this initially, I found through the use of print strings I was able to tell when the AI could see the player as the print string would appear in the top left corner saying 'I can see you' when the AI could see the player. Due to this, I was able to adjust the AI sight accordingly so that it would always track the player if it saw them. I then went on to add idle animations to the zombie which was accompanied by adjustments to the AI to make it so that they wouldn't follow the player if the player was behind them before they'd originally seen them. I continued to add the receiving damage and health to the zombie which included the different damage numbers from the two different weapons. I managed to achieve AI pathing within my level as well which was done with pawn sensing and AI pathing bounds. I estimate to have my game done by the 1st May and play tested by some friends around that time so that I can make final adjustments before the due date on 6th May. Once the AI is finished and the grenades are implemented I will be ready to reach this goal.