Devlog 2

214 days ago by LhwGames

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Week 5

In week five, people seemed to be happy with the GDD and so I began writing the story for the game, unfortunately none of the art students sent me any information about the narrative they wanted for the game even though they said they would and I asked them for it a couple of times on campus. Using the information on the pitch presentation as well as what Joe and I wrote in the GDD, I created a story outline/ plan that covered things such as the introduction, main characters, setting and world building, plot development, conflict and climax, resolution as well as dialogue and interaction. I created 10 character profiles, 1 for the player character, 3 for the other more important characters and 6 for the various npc characters that will exist to provide the player with side quests of lore. Once I had done this, I wrote a draft for the game’s story to the other members of the group to get their thoughts and opinions prior to writing the actual story. After this, I created a list of possible character interactions, along with the topics and purpose of each interaction. I then finally began to write the actual story/ narrative of the game based on those previous documents and once I had completed that, I wrote the dialogue for the individual character interactions, all of which included the main player character.

Week 6

In week 6, I managed to finish writing all of the dialogue for the character interactions that take place in the game between the player character and all the other characters, once I had completed the dialogue, I sent it to the rest of the team to get their feedback and all of those that replied seemed to be happy with how it turned out. After I was completely done with writing all of the necessary narrative documents for the game, I turned my attention to other aspects of the game. One of the first things I wanted to work on was a note system, I had the idea for a the player to be able to find various notes placed around the games map, these notes would feature additional pieces of lore/ information that would not have a direct impact on the gameplay but would help add to the world building. The information provided simply gives the player more knowledge about the planet and some of the things the colony had done/ discovered prior to the player character Alex arriving at the colony. The first thing I did to do this was write 20 pieces of information that could be used for the notes, however, I am fairly certain that I will only actually use about 10 of them for the notes that are in the game, I only created 20 because I’m not entirely certain what some of the assets the art student sare making will end up looking like so I do not know if the information i have written will make sense or not. I have sent the 20 options to the art students as well as the other programmers in order to get their opinions and to hopefully have them vote on which ones they would like to be featured in the final note system and game.

Week 7

I waited for the feedback on which 10 info options I should use for the note system but by the time I was back on campus, none of the art students had given me any kind of indication as to which note information options they would want to be used in the game even though I asked them to and so I simply took it upon myself to decide which ones I would use and which ones I would scrap, I did my best to pick ones that would make sense regardless of what the assets the art students made ended up looking and being like. Once I had decided on what the 10 notes would say, I found some png images of paper online and used photoshop to create the notes. Here is an example of what they look like.

After creating these 10 notes in photoshop, I created a new project in unreal engine 5 to make the note system itself, in the note system I made, it is possible to place the notes down anywhere you want them.

If the player walks up to the note and presses E while looking at the note, then it will disappear from the location it is placed and will rise up on the player's screen, whilst this happens, the screen surrounding the note will become blurred so that the focus is solely on the note itself, the note is placed back on the ground when the player presses E again.

Each note has its own Material, Blueprint Class, Texture and Widget Blueprint.

Material

I created this material in the content browser named Note 1, and added a texture that I created in Photoshop and dragged it into the material editor and then attached it to the base colour. I then attached it to the static mesh component in the note actor, I repeated this another nine times for the other nine notes.

Blueprint Class Viewport Blueprint Class Event Graph

Texture

Widget Blueprint Widget Blueprint Animation

Widget Blueprint Event Graph

I added the interaction interface to the note system and used the interaction event to get the player to interact with the note.

When the player presses the interaction key for the first time, it uses a flip flop node to first display the note on the screen and to ignore inputs for looking and moving and it sets the note actor in the level to invisible.

When the player presses the interaction key again, it calls the lay note down animation event to remove the widget and to make the note actor visible again in the world.

Also to give the look and move input to allow the player to move the character again.

On the note widget user widget in the event graph, I set up an animation called pick up note to play when the note is being picked up and put down.

In total, there are 10 notes in this system and they all function as intended, the note system is ready to be migrated over to the actual game project.

Week 8

I went into week 8 not entirely sure what I would be working on as up until this point in the development, our project leader Joe had wanted me to solely focus on all of the narrative/ story aspects of the game. Joe told me to work on a key card system for the doors in the game but then later on in the day he told me that he had just done it himself, luckily I hadn’t made it too far into the process of creating the key card system myself so I hadn’t wasted all that much time. We decided to quickly migrate the note system I had finished the previous week over to the main game project and that went smoothly, Joe actually ended up giving me a copy of the game project so that I would be able to have a look at it myself and while I was doing that he also wanted me to place down the notes around the map. Here is an example of one of the notes being placed down in both build mode and also in play mode.

Build Mode