Mine Cart Game Mode
Prototyping the mine cart game mode is reaching completion! We are trying to steer away from a linear map layout so we have gone for this ‘S’ shape to try and make the map balanced no matter what side you are playing on. Players use their weapons and abilities to push the mine cart into their base to score points. Along the track there are these track switches that allow you to to change which way the cart will go along the track. Toward the end of the week we did a bunch of internal play tests and had a blast so we have decided to continue development of this game mode.
Substance Painter
The artists began working with Substance Painter this week and are finding it a lot easier to texture the weapons and abilities this way. See the first texture pass below.
HUD
Having done some basic concepts a couple of weeks back, we have begun work on implementing our HUD concepts in the game. We are focusing on having the HUD more central on the screen so that it is more accessible to the player. The score and time for the current game mode will be stored at the top of the screen as this is the information that is important to the player but not so much that it needs to be the center piece of the HUD.
Gameplay Footage
Last but not least, we’ve got some new gameplay footage this week! This is some very raw footage just to briefly show the new abilities and game mode in action. We hope you enjoy!
From the Artists
Alex
For the beginning of the week I was working on finishing the Super crate particles. When implementing the particles into Unreal I learnt about how to lock the particle to certain rotations. I also tried out having a wind up and cooldown animation on the particle system. This involved having multiple emitters for each stage of the particle and using delays to time the particle systems. I also prototyped a new environmental object, the booster pad. This was an idea we had been throwing around for a while so I spent some time quickly prototyping it in blueprint. It was received well and was coded in c++ and added around our levels. My other major task was baking the normals for the shotgun. This was my first time baking in Substance Painter and I encountered some problems. The majority of my bakes showed hard edges which I tried to fix them by separating the uvs along those edges and smoothing the normals, however this didn’t fix it. Finally I worked on creating the placeholder particles for the Super shotgun. This posed a unique challenge as it has to be viewable from all angles. So as a fix I used a mesh particle emitter and double sided material to finish off the look of the particle.
Logan
Most of my time this week was spent working on the new texture style for the weapons and character. It was tough trying to figure out a balance between the style that we already had and the realistic capabilities of substance painter, this will be something that can now be iterated upon in the coming weeks thanks to the speed that SP provides. Since it wasn’t possible to get the new guns into the game for the alpha deadline I spent a little more time on the 3rd person and first person character textures. Since the character model wasn’t built with substance painter in mind I had to go back and suss out an ID map so that I could work in SP properly. Having this texturing method in mind from the start would have affected the way that I modelled certain things, this wasn’t really a major issue but was a really good learning experience. I also created the HUD graphics based on Nathan’s concepts and Chris set everything up in engine.
Nathan
I have continued working on environment this week, fixing rock collisions and creating props as necessary. I spent a lot of time modelling and making UVs resulting in a bunch of untextured models to place in the levels, as well as the main objective models for the new mine cart game mode which were a priority. For the time being I am reusing old textures or simple flat gradients for colour. I have also spent some time fixing a few old assets that needed it, mainly UVs. The main problem I am facing with the environment right now is over cluttering and over detailing certain areas. Placement of turbines and pipes can be a challenge with them appearing unnatural and clipping in most areas, but if they are supposed to be the only thing suspending the islands then they must be placed frequently. They also now affect the gameplay, pushing players away from them, so it requires a balance to ensure they make sense compositionally but aren’t too intrusive. I also began the setup process for the first person animations which I will work on next week.
From the Programmers
Chris
At the beginning of this week I originally wanted to start work on a new ability, the Bolas. However, after a stand-up meeting it was decided that while the Bolas could be made quickly, the animations might not be complete by submission time. I instead decided to work on a new super version of the shotgun, as the old super shotgun was only more powerful, but otherwise the same. The new super shotgun now fires a large, slow moving wall of air that acts more like area denial. The Bolas will be pushed back to Beta.
I worked heavily on the HUD this week. This included the FFA HUD, the scoreboard, the main HUD (for weapons/abilities) and an icon above the cart. I also created an in game menu using the same tools. Alex implemented a blueprint of a turbine that gave a boost to the player, and after testing and seeing that it added fun to the game I created a C++ class of it. Besides these, I worked on balancing the abilities and weapons.
I learned a lot about working with UMG interfaced with C++ through making the HUD and the in-game menu. At this point I am confident that I can access any variables that I need for HUD, gamemodes and player characters, and feel very comfortable with Unreal Engine.
Craig
The majority of this week was dedicated to finishing the implementation of the new game mode, and playtesting it early on to leave time for iterations. The playtest was a success, we found it an enjoyable game mode to play and I received plenty of feedback going forward. The track changers were changed to switch the activity of the track switcher instead of the track for a more intuitive gameplay experience. The map was too long, and narrow, which didn’t work well with our main mechanics, because being knocked left or right would be easy kills, against forward or back would be easy to survive. While the game mode is still being iterated as expected, the process is tidy and I’ve had no issues being able to keep the game mode contained on its own inside the project.
One of the biggest challenges from this week was implementing teams into Sky Noon, as this new game mode was a team based game. I had to set the Player State to copy over the team variables from the Lobby, and after I had done this I had not set the seamless travel boolean to true in the Lobby, but I had in the game map, so the lobby was not travelling seamlessly to the match, which had caused issues.
Henry
To give the artists more control of the UI, we have created all of our widget base classes in c++ before creating UMG widgets that inherit from them. By doing this we can handle all of the functionality in code while exposing variables which allows the artists to choose how the UI looks. I ran into problems with the server list because it needs to be populate a scrolling list of server row widgets. I managed to get it working by making a c++ function that calls a blueprint event to populate an array of server row widgets. I then call a blueprint callable c++ function that sets all of the session variables based on the IOnlineSession’s search results. Then when a user clicks the server row, it joins the session based on the index saved in the row.
The other c++ UI I have been working on is the lobby. I have now made it possible for the host to change the game mode and map within the lobby and allowed all of the clients to see which game mode and map are selected. Next week I will be working on getting all of the players in each team to be seen within the lobby UI as well as updating the session details in the sub system so that players searching for games can see the updated details without being connected to the session.