Alpha – Devlog 3

Gameplay

Spline Cart

We’ve started prototyping our upcoming mine cart game mode where players will battle to push a cart into their team’s base. As you can see the mine cart is moving along the spline when the player shoots it. There is still a lot of work to be done on this to balance impulses, speed and network replication but we are really happy with how it is coming along.

Cart-optimized

Super SpawnersSuperCrateActivated

We’ve made some major changes to the way that super crates are spawned. There are now three super spawners in the FFA level that are all inactive by default. After a set time from the beginning of the game, one of these three spawners will be chosen to activate. The game mode will then declare to all  players that a super crate is about to be spawned and moments later the selected spawner will fire a super crate into the sky.

SuperCrateSpawn-optimize

Art Style

We have continued to refine our art style and have a bunch of new environment assets as well as some new ability and weapon models.

Environments

Teleporter

There is a brand spankin’ new teleporter model with some basic animations for when it is activated. We’re hoping to have the asset in and working sometime next week.

teleporter_animation_gif

Clouds

It turns out volumetric clouds look awesome but absolutely wreck your frame rate.

clouds_gif_Henry-optimized

Weapons

Trying to better communicate the idea of pushing enemies away with steam/cloud technology we have remodeled the shotgun and grappling hook this week. Looking forward to seeing them in game with some steam VFX and SFX.

From the Artists

Alex

Started the week finishing off the Shotgun retopology and uv’ing. From past experiences with hard surface baking I made sure to split the uv’s around hard edges. While this will improve the baking process it increases the amount of uv shells which require more time to arrange properly. The other major task was recreating all rigs for our switch to a commercial venture. This has meant that we are using Maya Lt the cheaper “indie” version of maya which does not feature referencing. With this limitation I had to create almosts all rigs within one scene. This will create a large unwieldy file that if it breaks will slow down production. With this in mind I am being careful in how I setup the scene. Finally I finished the week adding more particles for the super crate spawning.

Logan

My main focus this week was redesigning the grapple gun. I had some trouble coming up with design elements to add to the gun because I wanted to retain as much of the original model as possible based on the short time frame that I had. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I have managed to get everything done. High poly, retopology and UV mapping have all been completed, the model is ready for texturing next week. On top of this I also made a denser version of the first person arms and rebaked them, the ones that we used in the pre-alpha were simply taken from the 3rd person character and were far too low res for the first person view.

Nathan

This week I continued with props for the environment and also concepted then modelled the teleporter. The turbine is coming along nicely, ready to be given proper textures in Substance Painter. Our art tutor David March gave us a brief tutorial on using Substance Painter to rapidly create fantastic textures with PBR. Using the built in systems of Substance Painter we will be able to create great looking textures for our assets without spending hours painting, which eases up our workload tremendously. I have also animated the turbine and teleporter, using scale animation to give them a bit more life and personality.

From the Programmers

Chris

In this third busy week I wrapped up a lot of gameplay features that had problems with them. One of these was the grapple hook. Feedback from within the group concluded that the grapple hook needed improving in terms of flow and feel. The main issue was that the player’s momentum was stopped in mid-air before a pull, so I gave the player some impulse towards their destination at the beginning of the pull and this solved the problem. I also fixed some problems with the new clamber, where clients could only clamber after grappling.

I did a balance pass on the weapons and abilities, which while still incomplete will help to make playtests more streamlined. The super crate is also finally re-implemented into the game, with a random location when it spawns. The tie-breaker duel period at the end of the FFA game mode was also updated to make all the crate spawners super.

The teleporter ability was updated, giving it a super version that creates an explosion when the player appears. Game mode HUD feedback was also re-added, an important feature that had been missing for a long time.

Through working on the gamemode and HUD systems, I learned a lot about what Unreal Engine classes control what parts of the game, and where variables should be stored for easy access from all players across the network. As always, I am also learning more and more about networking the second-to-second gameplay mechanics through working on the grapple hook, clamber and abilities.

 

Craig

This week I tried to get as many game breaking bugs fixed while also prototyping our new Game Mode, with a cart capture system. As this Game Mode was filled with a lot of complicated mechanics, I decided to prototype it in a separate project using Blueprint, and once the mechanics were sound, I reimplemented them optimally in C++ in the Sky Noon project. In hindsight, I was glad that I did this, instead of wasting time thinking about how best to do the mechanics over the network and with tidy code I was able to focus more on how the Actor interacted with the Splines (something I needed to focus on learning anyway) without small distractions.
The Game Mode is more or less implemented now, and ready to get some playtesting done so we can finish alpha with a mechanically sound, albeit unpolished, second Game Mode.

Henry

I’ve learnt a bunch about using timers and delegates in UE4 this week. I have queued up the reload animations so that they play at the end of the fire animations if the clip is empty after the fire or if the player has pressed ‘R’ while firing. This was done by checking the first person fire animation progress on the client and setting a timer to call the reload function based on the time remaining of the fire animation.

I got my basic implementation of match making working so that it pairs users together if they have low ping to each other. Using network delegate made this easy from the OnFinsSessionComplete delegate in both the GameSession and the GameInstance.

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