BLOG ENTRY 4 8.14.2020

Well progress is progress is what I like to say, If I said that regularly. Sorry for the nonsense I’m Just happy as heck that I was able to integrate some assets into my existing project with minimal issue.

The assets I added are all Weapons, they are part of the epic games store free content, Considering I will be replacing all the meshes and most animations with original models, these will do for now. I am extremely happy because now I can finally use them to start testing out different weapon behavior as well as assigning the different “elements” to represent each faction.

These are mostly based on previous iterations, borderlands, destiny, Diablo so on, The main difference being I want to adapt these common elements into a Sci-fi theme, and try to give them a twist when it comes to standard “elemental behavior”, I’ve got some ideas but they’ll need testing out, for starters create the base element behavior and then try to modify it. Once I start making the different projectiles I’ll start testing.

Another thing I was messing around was with the level design. I want to have an armory where you can build your raw weapons with no modifications. so I started messing around with the meshes from the assets I imported and build this nifty armory.

It is by no means complete considering I want to have 8 different elements. so technically the armory should be twice this size. I am however very satisfied with how it turned out considering I’m not a level designer by any means and my coding is questionable at best.

Another thing I was able to do earlier this week, Nighty Suggested that I remove the previous enemy AI as it felt overwhelming and was simply making testing a little too difficult. So I removed their behavior tree and reduced the spawning area to a smaller square. This allows for weapon testing much easier and since the spawn area is a little wide I can test whether aiming feels good or not.

Which I’m finally prototyping, The idea being that while in a third person and first person shooter your aim reduces your field of view. In a top down shooter It should allow you to see much further. This first attempt is kinda rough and I’m still not sure how to Lerp correctly so it feels better, But it’s proving my concept nonetheless.

Right now it feels harsh and there’s no transition between aiming down and regular hip fire aim. I’m hoping that looking at some tutorials I can reverse engineer it and get it to a place where it feels nice to aim down.

All in All I’m very happy with my own progress. I Still have a lot more to do but I’m looking forward to continuing working on this game. The next big step is integrating the cover system that eluded me for so long. I’ve finally have an asset which I Know I’ll have to tweak to adapt to my needs but If I can nail it my proof of concept will be pretty much done.

There’s still a long road to a full vertical slice with inventory and different class skills, but I assume that the more I fuck around with UE4 the better i’ll get and the faster I’ll be able to implement ideas and test them out. The huge skill gap the team currently has though is texture artists and modeling/rigging, So it’ll be a while before I can put out a polished demo with at least a mock up of the visual art style that I’m going for. but as I said… A few bits at a time.

I’m hoping I see more progress soon enough and I’ll post as soon as possible.

Riding the Hype train.

Daniel “Freaky” Aguilar

Game Designer

Plasmapunk Studios

A few Bits at a Time