Reflection

It's been a long semester. Aside from all the struggles, from corruptions to game breaks to broken animations, I was able to deal with it all to put together a playable game. Sure, there's the issue with being unable to package it, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I put a lot of time and work into making this game. I made all the assets myself, I watched and posted constantly about different tutorials, and I built the world. That's still something worth being proud of, I'd say.


I went from working off of provided assets,

To building a world of my own vision.

Game developers tell us all the time that making games is hard, but you truly don't understand how exactly hard until you start making games yourself. There is so much work that goes behind it, and you need to be someone with good time management skills and patience to handle it. But making a game on my own has been an experience I needed to have and I'm glad I did. It had it's ups and downs, but I learned so much from it and I feel like I can put a lot of what I've learned into future projects.

Close to the Finish Line

Everything's coming together!

Visual asset completion at 90%. For background art, I'm borrowing the long forest bg I made for my thesis, it will work just fine. Start/Restart buttons are all set:

They just need to be coded into the beginning and end of the game. In terms of music, I'm using a track provided by the lovely bensound.com.

For the final cutscene (which is just a slideshow of images detailing the end), I've sketched out the images in Photoshop and I'll be finishing them up in Clip Studio Paint which will then be all exported and put together in Premiere. There, I'll send the video file back to Unreal and set it so when you reach that tilemap with the skull, the game will end.

The white and orange images in the back of the tilemaps are a BG test to make sure the background will work with the platforms.

The square on the bottom that reads "INSTANT DEATH" will be a trigger for when Mimi falls through the cracks, she will lost all her health instantly and the restart button will appear.

From here, once the cutscene is complete, all I have to do is input the remaining visual assets, wrap up a few coding issues and this game will be ready to show!

Major Triumph: April 14th

Turns out the weird damage thing from last week was just a simple fix. But boy, was looking for the solution a huge stressful event.

But everything's coming together! Collisions are fixed, projectiles work (a little bug in terms of projectiles hitting enemies but I'm sure I'll figure it out), and now my list of things left to do is even smaller! It's mostly last minute visual work like the background and such.

Coding is almost done, all that's left to do is to fix the small bug with the enemies being attacked, make sure the death animation is properly fixed, and trigger the finale cutscene (a slideshow).

Also, the program crashed again today.

So beautiful, yet so frustrating. 

To-Do List:

1. Wrap up coding

2. Background Art

3. Start/Restart buttons

4. Music

5. Final Cutscene

A Reason But Not A Solution: April 12th

Well, I got good news and bad news.

The good news is, my damage system is working again!

The bad news is, it's all wonky.

When I hit play and enter the area, my character immediately takes three hits of damage with no explanation whatsoever. She's nowhere near the crab enemy, so I have no idea as to why this is. On top of that, I tried to go back into working on the health item sprite, and from there I realized what the core issue is.

My character is not responding properly to collisions.

I'm going to have to get a lot of help the next time I work on this, because I've scoured google and youtube for answers but have found nothing. I really hope I don't have to redo the entire character coding, but since it's definitely my character that's causing issues, I'm really worried that that's going to be the case.

The Braid tutorial I've been watching was good, but it's level of helpfulness ran its course and I looked for another one.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4vARnfO6MOjqrK5YMI1EwYcZSR7ycD9h

This one is alright, the narrator is rather clumsy at times but they've helped me fix the damage system so I think it's worth a shot.

Nice Enemies: Thursday, April 7th

Enemy AI is all set! I got the crab enemies to move back and forth on their own. I'm still working on how to get the damage collision assets to work again, but I'm glad to get that big part out of the way. This tutorial I found that uses assets from the game Braid has been really helpful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydcukgaeUFc&list=PLTfMG1EpxB2di3vuPRuZ7KAJPEvrrV9AU










The A and B markers in the editor mark the paths of the crab enemies. Enemy AI turned out to be a lot easier than I thought.

Updated list of things left to do:

1. Background art
2. Final cutscene
3. Start and Restart buttons
4. Music
5. Healing Item
6. Fix hit collisions