Battle of the Bands
On the week of 15th of January, I decided to remake a project I had created in First Year, known as Battle of the Bands. This was a rhythm-top down shooter where the player had to shoot to the beat. I originally had to abandon this mechanic due to time constraints and my lack of knowledge of Unreal as a first-year student, but due to a deeper understanding of Unreal, gave it another shot
I began with following a simple tutorial to get the base of a top-down shooter, being to shoot enemies while moving around a map. The simpliest way to do this was to spawn bullets, known as actors, in relation to the world transform, while having stationary enemies that upon overlapping the bullet were destroyed.
The hard part later came from making the rhythm mechanic itself. The easiest way I saw this possible was through a sequencer, which would call every second in order to check if the bullet shot was in-time. I put in a 60BPM backing track into the project and got cracking from here.
First and foremost, I made a BPM sequence event.
Then, I brought it to world, and had it loop infinitely in the level blueprint.
This would, at the 0.8 second mark, tell the game mode to add a beat.
Then, from here, it would give a small delay of 0.2 seconds for the player to shoot to register it within the beat, before then reverting back to not being in time.
I then set up the shoot mechanic to add or reset a combo dependant on if the Game Mode beat was in time, all determined by the sequencer.
Finally, we had an extremely early engine that responded positively if the player shot in-time in adding to the player's combo, and negatively if they didn't, all dependant on where in the sequencer is playing.
Character swapping was originally set up in it’s barest form. The long-term plan for the best game performance possible is to have the character switching tied to a singular skeleton following the style. While different characters will take that skeleton, they’ll all still fit around it so the bandaid solution of having to have five characters, with four invisible all in one mesh is avoided. However, for the current prototype, this was what I saw as the simplest option to bring forward character swapping.
Hypixel Game Jam
On the weekend of 26th of January until the 28th of January, me and my friends, Clare McAllister and Brandon McRae attended Hypixel studios for their hosting of us for the Global Game Jam.
Around the theme of "Make Me Laugh", we decided to make a game around the theme of a "sugar rush", where the player constantly wants to eat more candy to remain in a euphoric state.
I was a UI/UX Designer. Since the 3D Modeller decided to follow on a voxel style, a pixel artstyle only seemed appropriate, aiming for a more 16-bit shaded style.
I first sprited icons for items for the player to collect and enhance their sugar rush. I don't shade often, so this was a bit of a daunting experience for me, but I feel they came out rather well, and are recognisable from the low canvas space each of them had.
I then began on the logo. While using a pre-existing font, I added my own touch of having a texture like a candy cane by drawing over it.
I then made gradual more elements for it, such as chocolate-themed buttons, sugar mountains as backgrounds, all giving a feel of sweet overindulgence.
Bringing this into Unreal Engine, I felt to really lean into the comical style, it would be appropriate to have mountains of sugar rain down upon the player when starting the game, experimenting with animations to achieve this. I also added some very loud chomping VFX, simply for the "make me laugh" theme.
Additionally, I made the Pause Menu a box of chocolates that you need to bite into to proceed through the level in lieu of the theming, once again with animations such as a lid coming off/on again.
I also made an on-screen hud, trying to condense the area's of the weapon, ammo and reserve into one for convienence. Additionally, I also tied our sugar rush mechanic to a bar resembling a candy-cane, being getting more power the more sweets you eat. Finally, I combined these all to keep the interface in a consistent place throughout the game.
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