Capstone Production Blog 8

The big thing feedback that we got this week is that we needed something to bring all of these systems together. Given the fact that we have a lot of narrative aspects of the game, we decided that using the narrative to tie them together would be a great idea. So we started to concept the idea of narrative arcs, where the player is taken along a story through the use of their adventurers, customers, and the boss fights.

While we started to ponder how to make that work, on the programming end this time was spent mostly figuring out how to get some different aspects of the art into the game. Since we still wanted to have the worm be the boss, we needed a worm rig for the animations. That broke. We tried weeks ago to get it to work, and the time it was taking us to try and fix it was time that we can use to make customers, or other props. So we got static meshes of the worm at the specific locations that he needed to be in that instant, and used those as placeholder for the player.

At least we did.

This part of the sprint, we finally got the worm rig to work, and even had animations to use for the player character.

Go us!

Except, I’ve never really imported animations into Unreal before.

So I spent time researching and figuring out how unreal wants to deal with animations, their importing, and using them from a skeletal mesh. With animation blueprints, I was able to link them to the player and the enemy, and even create bools that would tell me when to call certain animation sequences. Once I had that, I even figured to play events from certain parts in the animation timeline, so I was able to give impact to the players attacks (which are now melee, their implementation was straight forward and not too interesting so I didn’t mention them. Sorry.) . With that, our boss fight area was starting to look like a real game. We got rid of the place holder art for the player and the enemy, and now our artist is starting to place assets throughout the shop map, and the enemy map.

The other things I worked on were making customers have an image of some kind that the player can look at, and working on giving them more dialogue when it came to items.