Nothing a few lines of code can't fix.

Welcome to my portfolio where I can show off the projects that I've been a part of. Enjoy!

[jwmont-blog]

To the Death is Gold! We’re proud of where we got due to so many issues happening during development of this game. Some of the original features were cut from the final product, but overall we fell like we came up with a fun finished product that has some minor bugs that we couldn’t get to be finished before final deadline. Overall, I learned a lot about developing a project while meeting expectations & deadlines, how to deal with conflicts during development and how to resolve them top continue development, and so much more! Overall, I’m glad I got to be part of a team to develop a product. I hope you guys enjoy our game that was made in 4 months.

[jwmont-blog]

Hey Guys!

Here’s a preview of what our game’s looking like right now. We have networking fully working now! Now it’s on to improving gameplay mechanics, and making the game fun!

- Jash

[jwmont-blog]

To The Death Log Week 3 – 3/16/2017 – by Jashua M.

Replication, replication, replication! This week, we had a good base of Networking working. We had a lobby that players could join in, we had players being able to choose their colors for the game, and we had them all server traveling to a level where they could fight. There was a problem, our gameplay was not being replicated. What that means is when a client performed an action, none of the other clients knew about that action. So, for example, when I picked up a weapon and threw it at someone, none of the other players knew that even happened.

This lead to me working on replicating all our gameplay actions. For every single action being performed client side, I had to tell the server “Hey, I made this action”. Then the server acknowledged the action and said “Okay got it, let me tell every other client that this happened”. That way every other client knew and saw on screen what action was performed. So, what I got to make was to change all the gameplay input events, and making them all perform RPCs. Now, RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls) are functions that are called locally, but executed remotely on another machine (separate from the calling machine). Now in short, on client side I would make an RPC that would call functions on server side telling the server I performed this gameplay action, and the server would loop through every player in the game, and perform the action I started on their end.

The reason why this was such a big deal is because we made a Server Game Mode that contained references to every player controller that joined our session, but each individual player controller only knew about himself. So, every time a player controller performed an action, we would store the reference to that controller that performed the action, and tell every other controller in the game that the controller being passed in performed this action. And that was what finally allowed each client to acknowledge the actions every other client would perform. I had to perform RPCs for weapon pickups, weapon throws, destroying weapons, player scores, player animations, sound effects, and HUD updates.

[jwmont-blog]

Video Update today!

So here’s my progress working in my Capstone project. We finally got proper networking done in our game, and I got to replicate my gameplay work for all clients. Left side is the server, right side would be a client. Safe to say, it’s working!

[jwmont-blog]

To the Death log – 3/9/2017 – by Jashua M.

This week started off by me coming back to the project and learning all the new changes that happened while I was off at GDC. I haven’t been able to work in the project for a week, and I felt a bit overwhelmed with the new changes, since they were mostly Networking changes. I was still a bit rusty with networking before I left, so coming back to it was a bit shaky. My first hours consisted of me scrolling through the new C++ classes that were made, and all the new blueprints that were added for networking purposes. Now, I haven’t touched blueprints this entire time because I’ve been writing all the gameplay in C++ classes.

After a while I understood everything that was made, and I talked to my teammate Sean, in which is our designated networking guy, with many of the questions that I had in regards to networking: what should be called client side, server side, what should be replicated, etc. After all of that was done, we were still having issues with players being able to spawn a pawn that can be controlled when they joined the server. I took the task and worked on it. What was happening was that players could successfully join the lobby, but no one could spawn their own pawn. After a while of reviewing the blueprints, I noticed that the wrong player controller was being called to possess their pawn. So basically, whenever someone joins the server, a player controller gets created and assigned to the new player. Now, each controller has their own index (in server side, since it has all the controllers in the game). Whenever someone joined, a pawn would be spawned for player controller 0 and possessed. What was happening was that everyone was trying to control the pawn that was spawned for the host. That was quickly solved with an event called OnPostLogin, which basically gives a reference of the new player controller being created. And based off of that reference, we would spawn a pawn and have that reference control the pawn. Solved!

That was my biggest problem coming back. Everything else has been smooth. Got some gameplay working. I can properly pick up weapons from the ground, and can drop them. Nothing too fancy, but it will be when I can make them projectiles that can be thrown at other players for a potential kill! I want to point out that the socket system for the skeletons in Unreal Engine 4 is amazing, it’s basically a new bone that I made in the skeleton, and when a player picks up a weapon, I attach the weapon to that bone. I have it attached to the inside of his hand, so now in every animation that we’ll have, the player will hold the weapon in their hand! Something so small, but will help for future iterations.

[jwmont-blog]

To The Death - Pitch Video

Well for our final project game, we had to come up with a pitch video that explains the design of our game. And if it was good enough, it would be approved by the head chairmen of the Game Development degree and would be allowed to be developed. Safe to say, we got approved!

[jwmont-blog]

Video Update!!! I finally have something moving on screen! I got one of my minions to spawn, then I made a spawner to spawn multiple waves of them (in which was making my frames drop like crazy), and finally I gave them a position to move to. Now that they move to a given position, I have to feed each individual lane their own position to where they have to go.

[jwmont-blog]

Here’s my first blueprint! I was working on my creeps, basically all I’m doing here is checking to see if a target is in range of this current creep’s range, and also checks to see if the creep is ranged or not! Seems like a lot of nodes for just this functionality (in which I would agree), but this helps me out to visually see what’s going on with the creeps. 

[jwmont-blog]

Time to Work!

Well, I finally feel a bit comfortable enough with Unreal to start my own project. I’m currently working on making a player that can receive input from a controller or a keyboard, get the feel of that, and then I’m going to experiment on giving it it’s own input tree. I’m trying to take small steps here to be clearer of what I’ll have to be taking for when I start implementing the AI system. Can’t lie, I’m pretty excited for this!

[jwmont-blog]

Blueprint System!

So through every video I watch to keep learning Unreal Engine, the more I’m liking the blueprint system. I remember when I was working on Unity and doing console apps, how sometimes I would get my player input mixed up was such a hassle to maintain. But Epic made their inputs so easy to attach and maintain. Like honestly, it’s pretty cool how everything is already there in their inspector window, all you have to make sure is that you’ve binded the right keys to the behavior wanted, and you are golden. My blueprints are starting to get bigger now, but I can understand why since they can manage a bunch if things like inputs, animations, behaviors, etc.

[jwmont-blog]

Big Update Here!

So being honest with you, I wasn’t liking the whole blueprint system at first. I started off learning how to write everything out in C++ code, so I was looking for that same way to do most of the things I would like to do in the Unreal engine. I’ve mostly been using Unity to make my own games, so I was used to writing scripts to get all my needs to work. But being honest here, after seeing a bunch of videos of how the blueprint system works like, it’s going to make everything so much easier! Like the thing I like the most about it is that you can see the transitions from one node to the other right there, where I would’ve been doing a bunch of break points in code to see where one thing leads to the other one. So far I’m liking the system even more now, and the Persona section of the engine where you can make animations and stuff like that is also a life saver. I can’t recall how many times I was stuck because I couldn’t exactly figure out what was going on in Unity, and now I can see how it all leads from one to the other. This is amazing.

[jwmont-blog]

Getting to learn how to do creeps from Epic Games themselves!

I found there’s an actual series from an Epic Games developer teaching how to build creeps related to their Paragon game. That’s where I’m mostly getting inspirations from, since I play that game on a regular basis. I’m glad I found this out, each video lasts an hour long but I’m okay with them.

[jwmont-blog]

So I kept watching the other series of how to use Unreal Engine 4, and I kinda got a big grasp of how the tools work. Basically since I’ve been using Unity the most, they kinda share similar tools when it comes to an inspector and detailing each individual object. I’m now currently watching another series from the official Unreal Engine 4 YouTube profile where they show you how to create 3rd person characters using their blueprint system. That’s mostly what I’ll be focusing on during this project, and I’m glad I found this series! Wish me luck.

[jwmont-blog]

Today I’m basically going through a web series from Virtus Learning Hub on YouTube on the basics of Unreal Engine 4. This would be my most challenging task this month. Blueprint system seems like a challenge, but as long as I stay dedicated it can go right. 

[jwmont-blog]

Welcome to My Developer Blog!

Here I’ll be posting my current projects and milestones I’ve accomplished. I’ll also be posting my thought process throughout my projects as much as possible. Hope you enjoy!

[jwmont-blog]

Hey guys!

Here’s a demo of a game that I worked on with two other friends. This took us two months to develop, nothing too fancy and it’s rough around the edges. But we’re proud of it, and we enjoyed our teleporting mechanic! Hope you guys enjoy.