Week 1 - Preparation For Game Development

In Week 1, I spent most of my time having to set up a Trello board in order to keep myself organised with meeting set deadlines. I have provided a link to the Trello board below if you'd like to see what I have planned to show next on the development of the game.

Trello Link:

https://trello.com/b/8DO89bKB/games-prototyping

GDD Link:

https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/sharpe-p1_ulster_ac_uk/EUo8Zfls-StMpl0hQ5QIWDMBu2Q2udLXmSgVaQ5p_tZb5Q?e=EeyUtF

I had gathered all of the information on the GDD that I had theorised on what the game could work like such as in terms of having the main mechanics and features introduced. I broke down the GDD in the Trello board so that I would be able to easily understand what I have to do per week. This stopped me from needing to constantly open the GDD word document which can take so much of my time searching for what I needed to do next.

However, I did set-up the game prototype project on Unreal Engine 4 using the third person template which isn't the greatest but it was a start on working on the player's controls, movement and camera. For instance, I added in the player controls inputs into the UE4 project by looking at the set controls I made in the GDD.

Player Controls

Although, I did make some changes to the player controls such as adding an input key by pressing H to heal by picking up med-kits across a level which should keep players alive. Also the player control input for grenades and flashbangs has been combined into one Action Mapping called throwables by a matter of pressing F.

Player Movement

There is some key changes that I made when working with the third person template on player movement which was the character movement in the third person character blueprint. I changed the gravity scale to 2 to make it more realistic so that the player feels like they have weight to carry. This brings me to the max acceleration which I lowered to 200 because I didn't want the player to just out run enemies and instead make the game feel more of a challenge. The braking friction factor was changed to 0.2 and the braking friction was even lower to 0.05 which was perfect for the player stop at anytime. I changed the jump Z velocity to 800 and the air control to 0.8 to fit with the rest of the character movement settings. I also had to change the max walk speed to 200 with having the player's run speed doubled. I can further discuss this as on the second image below, I used the sprint input action as an event with using a timeline to increase the max speed from 0 being idle, 200 being walking and 400 to be the max running speed. However, the recording clip of the movement is what I've been working on with the added animations and the player mesh used from Mixamo for the third person character.

Idle>Walk>Run Transition Animation Blend space 1D

Camera

The default position of the camera for the third person character was changed as I wanted the camera to be at the same height as the player and slightly towards the right. An example of a game that has a similar camera position to the player is Hitman.

Default Camera Position>Fixed Camera

Here is the scripting behind making the camera locked to the player when rotating the character. Having the "ChangeCam" event using the event tick makes the camera lock instantaneously.