Games Project - Game Creation Week 11/12

This blog will be a combined post for the last two weeks as the deadline is approaching and it makes more sense to combine these last two weeks into one as all that can be really said is that we will be finishing our work. Week 11 began with the hard task of pulling it all together but once again we encountered a problem which was that the project files Ben had saved and brought were not what we needed as it was just the project files and not the full entire file. After some discussion and sweating slightly as a group we decided that myself and Andy would take over on the Unreal front and Ben would take over the documentation and get up to speed with that as we felt it was best since myself and Andy had found it much easier to work with the Unreal development environment than Ben had and it only made sense to work to our strengths. 

I believe that the next upcoming two weeks will be hard because we will be needing to complete all of our coursework at the same time and hand each one in roughly on the same date. However I am feeling confident that we will be able to balance out all of the work for each class and produce a high standard for each one. Each of us have come far from week 1 in terms of ability as Andy has shown off skills in AI programming and level creation as he stepped up to the mark to pick up from where Ben left off. I have worked hard to understand the development process in programming a basic main character and managed to have it interact with the world around it. Ben has done well to keep the documentation up to date but did falter in communication in regards to the version of Unreal Engine which set us back however it did allow him to focus fully on documentation when Andy took over and it gave us all that extra bit of determination to finish the project.

The next stage of this last part is to compile everything we have done and have it all on the one project file which will take a bit of migrating of files and last minute checks but I believe that we will be in the clear once this is done and we can focus on last bits of documentation and anything else we would need to fix. Overall this project has gone really well as despite its bumps and problems we still managed to keep on going and fix whatever came our way. 

Games Project - Game Creation Week 10

Our discussion with the lecturer went well and we managed to get a clearer idea on what type of game we will be creating because whilst we haven't created exactly what we had in mind 10 weeks ago we have altered and changed things to come up with an almost new game altogether and our lecturer in all honesty said that we shouldn't worry too much because while we didn't achieve what we set out to we still have created something that we can be proud of.

In all honesty I believe that through the past 10 weeks we have been hard on ourselves and because we all have in mind what games are now and the high standard that is produced it's hard not to get swept up in it all and get a bit cocky thinking you want to create something just as good and be a one man army. 

In the past 10 weeks we have worked with a software that we have never used before doing this module, managed to create assets and implement them into a game successfully, programmed a basic sidescroller game from scratch and learned a lot about the journey that creating games takes and how much work is needed behind the scenes.

The game we are creating now is much more of a platform game than we had first thought but that's what happens in the real world. A project grows and evolves as time passes and I believe that is what has happened here in our group project and now after working on this I am more excited and I feel that the other team members are equally as interested to start working on other projects and creating more games in the future.

Games Project - Game Creation Week 9

This week was an interesting week to say the least. We ran into quite a big set back and it has put us behind for a few weeks worth of work sadly. In our lab we were discussing Unreal Engine and there was a updated version that had been released which was version Unreal Engine 4.12.0 and we all talked about what new features were in it and had a look at it and after having this discussion we discovered that Ben had been creating our levels on version 4.11.0 which doesn't sound bad until we realised that myself and Andy had been using version 4.10.0 and unfortunately Unreal doesn't have backwards or forwards compatibility. 

Not the best way to start week 9 however, we will just have to put in a lot more work and hope for the best in the end. The good news for this week is that I have been tinkering with collision after last week's discussion and have managed to get the code working for the punching to collide with objects in game which means that we can start using the main character to attack enemies.

The code itself is fairly simple as it allows the attached trigger spheres on the character's hands to be able to collide with other objects if they have physics and collision coded to them. This was tested by placing a sphere in game, giving it physical properties and then using the character to punch the ball around a small area and into a goal at the end of the area. 

Next week we are going to have a meeting with our lecturer so he can get an idea where we are in terms of development and we can show him parts of the game that we created and ask questions about what he thinks on different ideas if we still have any.