Sam.T - FMP

Main College Project Blog

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Project - Ending Reflections

With my project practically complete and turned in, I though doing some final reflections on the project overall wouldn't hurt.

I'm really happy with its overall outcome, I did the main thing I set out to do and it works pretty well id say. The working high score also adds to the games replay-ability quite a lot but it does lack in not properly saving once you've quit the game, that's just my limited knowledge of save states and things like that.

There are still few errors on my part I managed to forget about, but I've ran out of time to make any changes to the final outcome. They weren't anything massively obvious or game braking ultimately so it isn't the worst thing in the world.

The biggest thing I'm glad about though would probably be the fact that I was able to make a relatively complete game that I felt was of a high enough quality that I could make that was worthy of publicly uploading, Even though its not likely that many people would see it I still think its a decently sized step for me.

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Game 'Sustainability'

In terms of game replayability, I thing my game fits that to a tea, considering its arcade styled gameplay, it allows for endless hours of gameplay to keep beating your high-score.

Another advantage to my game using minimal performance intensive assets, Other than getting a pretty smooth 120FPS without major drops, is that its relatively small in terms of storage, granted I'm not the most experienced with optimizing games, it is still under 1GB, which I like to see as a win.

Discover how the CPU impacts gaming performance and learn why a powerful processor is crucial for an optimal gaming experience. Boost your g

From looking at this website I've also understood the importance of CPU's a bit more, and with that knowledge I can pinpoint the aspects of my game that would cause the most strain on the CPU, though unless you're trying to run my game with a pc from 2006 (rough estimate) you'd probably run it just fine

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Project - Final Outcome

All done and almost complete in my eyes, but its the deadline so I cant do any more work on it.

And here's a showcase with the pip-boy.

Finally, I've uploaded the game onto itch.io!

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Project - Keybind Bug

A bug I discovered while showcasing my game to family was the key bind button only toggling once, and never again.

My original method was using Booleans in each of the menus, which caused the bug, but I managed to fix this by simply swapping the booleans, having it in the key bind widget rather than the menu widgets.

Then the key bind menu simply turns its own boolean off when closing.

Simple fix but something I somehow overlooked when preparing the test build for playtesting.

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Project - High Score Shinanigans

Looking at a bit of feedback from my initial playtest, I decided to add a high score system, since that was the main thing the game was missing. (this was a pain for no reason)

Since I'm near the end of this project I decided to recycle code from a previous project for its working high score, it took some adapting but it pretty much worked first try without any bit errors

I did have to recreate some missing assets that were missing in this game, they were merely used to store values and such.

To get the score to save and load when the player dies was a real trouble though, it started fine but didn't want to save when respawning the player and always seemed to error when setting the high score. It took me a while to figure out (and with some help) I managed to get it working.

Last thing to do was make it load the high score when certain things happen, like the player spawning for instance, this part of the blueprint was copy pasted to different spots where it was needed.

Voila, working high score as last.

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Playtest Feedback

The Initial Playtest of my game went really well, I had a lot of positive feedback along with quite a bit of things to improve.

The controls were quite well received, and people really liked the pip-boy gimmick. Most of the responses also gave some good ideas for some future improvements if I get the time to tweak the controls.

People generally liked my games loop, though they definitely gave the idea that high score and some more gameplay features should be added

I'm quite glad that there weren't many bugs in the game, and the retry error is simple and easy to fix. I did have some extra feedback that some people liked the fact that the shrapnel from the enemies collide with the player, and I did try to make then not collide but that ends up resetting the shatter component so I couldn't do it even if I wanted to.

Honestly I expected a bit of 50/50 with this but I'm happy with the result of this other that one that couldn't tell between the shades, my plan is to change it slightly to reflect the environments inspiration a bit more.

Not much I can say here other than taking the ideas into consideration, some would be harder than others with my level of experience.

I'm happy with this rating, would've liked some more varied results but I guess I made my game well and it was polished enough to get mainly 7/8s

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Project - UI Polishing

With the key bind UI, it was originally set to create the widget, but not limit how many times it could be created so it caused the player to constantly press the button and create overlapping widgets, which isn't the best.

this allowed the widget to be created once and only once, just some boolean checks really. This will be copied for any other key bind buttons you'd have

then this is the way the menu closes and is able to be reopened again, quite simple altogether.

With the new close button ill need to make some more button images in photoshop but that wont be too tedious to do.

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Project - UI

The ui was probably one of the simpler tasks i had to do, but it still took a while.

with the games base template including a functional key bind mechanic, that I made during a workshop during the early stages of the project, it saved a lot of time when it came to UI since I had already done a bit of the work.

I was also forced to use Photoshop for creating some of the buttons that were exclusively text, as well as for making the games crosshair

this is generally what the other menus look like, and its also a nice little spoiler to the games control mapping.

There are still some things I could tweak, but they are at a stable enough state at this moment.

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Retro HUD's

For the hud and menus I had the idea of sticking to a retro style like the game itself, so I looked at some older games/games on old consoles and how they do their huds

Battlezone is an obvious inspiration and idea, it has very simplistic elements, score and highscore with lives, but also a compass telling the player where enemies are within a certain radius which is really cool.

Vectorblade is another game I'm drawing inspiration from, its vector screen makes it hard to make small connected lines for things like numbers so the dotted style is something I could go for as well.

Its also alot simpler in the fact that there is only the current score and spaces for the word 'EXTRA' on the right of the screen, alot simpler than Battlezone.

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Project - Death Camera

Expanding on the players death, i implemented a camera that follows the player around, ready to capture their death.

I did attempt to put this in the player but the movement and player tracking wouldn't have worked.

The player is merely used for telling the camera when to switch now.

re-using the same player tracking for the AI tank, and using prior knowledge from one of my old projects, I was able to make it track the player, and also follow them slowly

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Project - Player Death

The player can die now! using the same system for when the AI dies I have a just as satisfying death for the player, with the shattering model and all.

It actually produced a couple bugs, some of which included the player not dying when they should, enemies constantly shooting after death and after respawning, enemies constantly shooting even when not seeing the player, causing a soft-lock. Thankfully, these errors are fixed now and the game is now extra polished because of it!

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Project - AI Aim

Final stretch of development now, I managed to get the AI to actually shoot the player, I struggled with it for a good while since nothing I searched up online gave me any real help.

It ended up being one of my course tutors that helped me out, and it was annoyingly simple..

with this the AI now constant look at me, but with the combination of the revised firing system I tweaked, they now fire when seeing the player, rather than relying on a collider. (I just connected the movement for detecting and following the player to the firing system with a couple Boolean checks to ensure it fires when its meant to)

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Near-End Project Goals

Coming up to the end of this project now, I've still got a couple more things to finish up with the game, most of its Hud's are practically nonexistent so I will have to make those if I want to call my game complete, as well as making the player killable, because without that it wouldn't have a very good gameplay loop. Audio is also on the list but not the highest priority over the mechanics and visuals of the game.

Overall I should be able to get this don't by the very end of the project, its nothing that is overwhelmingly hard for me but it does take time to look nice and work well.

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Project - Extra Improvements

I had bit of extra time left with development for today so I was tinkering with some of the AI bits I had created and have improved some bits.

A little error on my part that I discovered was that after you shot a tank and it shattered, it still shot at you until it was dead, which wasn't the best, so I went into the blueprint for killing the tanks and edited a bit to use a boolean that wasn't in use at the time, and linked some excess stuff to it since it didn't make sense to leave it separate.

Then that same boolean was linked to the shooting as an extra check and now it works fine, no shooting when they themselves are shot.

Then as another error which turned out to help improve the game itself.

if you shot tanks in quick succession, it would bug out the enemy cap and spawn an extra tank, so I took this and implemented a timed delay that slowly increases the enemy count over time, which negates the need for separate levels, and gives the game a bit more challenge with more tanks at once.

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Project - Initial Reflections 1

Now that I've got my AI pretty much complete, I though it was the right time to do a bit of reflection on what I have just produced for this project.

Overall I'm quite proud of what I have made with the AI, it works how I want it to work in this simple version of the game I have, and there's a decent amount of room for improvement, I wish I was able to get the model to show less lines but whatever I tried just different work, which was annoying.

So ultimately, I've still got some stuff I want to do to this AI opponent, but whether ill have the time to or not will decide if I end up doing more to it or not.

Now that I'm looking at it all I technically need to do it make this a basic final outcome is to add a proper HUD and death screens, possibly a start menu as well and that's it really.

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Project - AI Spawn

Before now I have just been placing individual instances of the AI in the world, which works fine, but unless I want to restart the game every time I kill all the enemies, it wont work in the long run.

with this video I was able to create a variation of the blueprint to allow for the tanks to keep spawning, and at a certain amount.

this was the original design for the spawning, it was an actor with spheres as the spawn points, with integer values for controlling how many tanks spawned at once.

it was good but whenever the tanks spawned their AI pathing wouldn't work even though I had a nav mesh and had tested that it worked fine beforehand without the spawner.

It took me a decent amount of time to find the fault for causing the broken AI, and it turned out that spawning the 'actor' wasn't enabling the AI, so to speak. Instead I used a spawn AI node, then it worked like a piece of cake.

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Project - AI Destruction (and the new map)

With the help of one of these videos I was able to make my AI tank shatter into little pieces when they were shot

There are some tweaks I want to make to how it looks but that goes beyond my knowledge of unreal engine, and it would take too much time to try and figure out when I could take that time to work on the game.

the blueprint basically says to hide everything about the tank and show the destructible mesh as soon as the player projectile comes in contact with the tanks hitbox, combined with projectile physics allows for the shatter to look the way it does, the polycount issue I had with the initial model I used is an issue here but I have nowhere near the amount of experience to replicate old game techniques in new software so its not something I am incredibly bothered about.

Since there isn't much to say about it, and the fact its seen in the gif, I have made a simple map for the game, its flat and open, with 2d triangles replicating mountains.

its small at the moment because it has no need to be absolutely massive, because the bigger the map the more time I will have to invest into making it as best as I can, which I still need to do even with this simplistic map.