Production phase - week 2

Programming

Implementing Effects

For this week, our main goal was to improve player feedback into our game by adding different RFXs into the game. These RFXs where mostly linked into the mechanics of the game, due to this it was important to get them right and have them work as the mechanics logic is intended to work. In specific cases, the easier path to spawn these Niagara systems were through blueprints, however, this didn't apply for every mechanic, for example, whenever the character is running/landing smoke is spawned at its feet, transferring the already exsiting logic of these actions to blueprint was actually harder due to how we had designed it previously, due to this, we had to use Niagara within C++ scripts. This, however wasn't as easy as it would seem, just including the NiagaraFunctionLibrary was a challenge on its own given the lack of documentation and guidelines on it. Finally, however after hours of searching, we came across a website explaining how to use these functions within C++. However, one important effect is still left to be added, the primary fire effect, given there were some complications when attaching it to the desired compenents we haven't been able to overcome.

                                                     

          

Unique Character Meshes

Since until now, we only used one character mesh for every character, and our goal for the week was adding more player feedback, a very important addition to the game was having unique character meshes per player. This took some looking into making because even as simple as it sounds, some limitations due to Unreal's design had to be overcome in order to load the correct meshes at the start of the game per character.

HUD/Life System

We implemented the HUD so now you can see the cooldown of your jump and the cooldown of the shooting. We also implemented a really simple life system and we made this visible in the hud by adding hearths under the character icon.

Art

RFX

This week we worked a lot on implementing the rfx we already created. Some changes were necessary to make them appear correctly in-game. We also created an effect for the chest opening animation. This will play when a player opens a chest.

Animation 

An idle animation was created for when a character is not moving. Some first steps where also made to implement animations, but this was more research than anything.