Easter Break and Rework

So before the easter break, I had a meeting with my supervisor about the project. As we were talking about the aims of the project, he mentioned conversations he’s had were recruiters in the industry and how they see so many portfolios with the default character model in Unreal. If my portfolio is to stand out it would be best to use other assets. My supervisor recommended I source assets from the Unreal workshop as there would be a number of free assets that I could import into my curtain project and future projects.

I over the easter break I found asset packs that I felt would fit the style of game I was

making, these are the Stylized Fantasy Provencal pack for the assets to fill the world and the City of Brass: Enemies pack for the enemy characters. I made sure that these asset packs had a similar art style so it wouldn’t take away from the gameplay itself. Now that I had these packs this meant that had to spend some time reworking these assets into the animation BluePrints and ensuring the animations play at the right time and for the correct duration. Now I just need to find a character model that matches these two packs and then I have the visuals sorted.

Next, I set out to use the Stylized Fantasy Provencal pack to create a playable area where the player can play around with the mechanics. The asset pack had materials for the Unreal Landscape tool along with buildings for a medieval village and castle for me to use to create a playable level.

I ended up making two versions of an arena. The first version I made was a floating island idea I had. On the island, there was going to be a village that was being attacked by monsters that have come from the mines. The mines on the map would act as spawn points for enemies so that they could keep coming to the player and as the player defeats them they will earn XP that will allow them to unlock new skills so I can demonstrate my progression system. I also designated the starting area as a safe zone where no enemies will respawn so the player has a safe area to test out new abilities but there will be some that will as this will introduce the enemies to the player early on in a controlled number.

The second area I made was after I realised that I need more practice with the landscaping tool to make a nice-looking environment so I decided to make a new area where I only need a limited amount of work with the landscaping tool itself. This lead me to a kinda snow globe arena, with different areas for the player to explore and for the enemies to spawn in. I wanted to use the same principles as before so the starting area will have a few enemies to introduce the player to the combat and then serve as a safe zone to test out new or changes to their abilities.

Since I was able to take a step back from the project for a week or so when I came back I started feeling like the combat was more rigid than I would have wanted and this was hammered home for me when I showed the combat to my supervisor. and he mentioned he’s been playing the short SpiderMan game they made for the character Mile Morales. This sparked the idea in my head of how to reincorporate the free-flowing combat system I had made earlier in the project. I initially shifted away from using this as I felt at the time it might not work with the ranged abilities I was planning but taking inspiration from the SpiderMan PS4 games I figured out a way to make it work. So firstly.to how the free-flowing combat system works in my project, I attached an arrow component to the character and set it’s rotation based on the player movement input, when the player tries to attack an enemy it will lock onto the enemy at the closest angle to which way the arrow is pointing. I had set the ranged attacks to be homing so if the player locked onto an enemy in the old system and the enemy was moving the projectile would curve towards the enemy instead of going in a straight line. I reused this by having the same system I use to determine which enemy the player wants to attack by having that set the target for the homing setting in the projectile component. So when the player fires the ranged attack it’ll check which enemy it is at the closest angle to the direction the player is moving and fire a projectile that will lock onto that enemy.

To give the player more control over who they can attack I repurposed the targeting button

into an aiming button. Now the player can aim at the enemy of their choice and fire a projectile at them. I have added a capsule trace to this to set the target of the homing setting but also to give some leeway to the player to don’t have to be so precise as this version of the combat seems to be getting faster.

Screenshot of the capsule trace debugging. Starting at the

camera location and following it's forward vector until it hits.

I have also split the ranged and close-quarter spells onto different button presses, this way it gives the player more options during combat but I am still intending to include the evolving spells concept I’ve had.