In these past few months I have become quite intimate (yes, intimate) with Unreal Engine. It has gotten to the point then while watching some training videos from their YouTube channel I can identify where the trainers are getting things wrong, or when they are missing certain parts. Of course many of the people teaching the lessons have are focused on certain aspects of the engine, such as animation, sound design, lighting, audio, etc. So it would make sense they didn’t know all the aspects. It’s comforting to see that the people who work at the company are as confused as I am about their program.
I continued a short series on creating a melee system for a game. I used some logic that I learned to add more complexity to the system I already had. Then I watched some of the animation trainings I had on my watch list, and I learned a ton about their common practices, and other complicated stuff I did need to get my head around such as additive animation, converting to single frame animation, adding sub-state machines to the animation graph, and a lot that’s enough to make my brain explode. It is clear as I flood myself with info that I am pushing out some of the stuff I was doing a few months prior such as my modeling work for blender. If I tried to do now what I did then I’m not sure exactly what I would recall.
At the end of my working periods I like to cap it off with a boss fight. It’s getting more and more fun to fight the boss. My biggest issue is getting clean animations. There’s so much work and sweat that goes into making sure that switching from animation to animation is smooth. That’s the next thing I need to figure out. The more animations I had the harder it gets. Good gameplay will require the best I can do when it comes to getting this right.
Also came up with a system that sets the dash direction of the character. When I do logic such as this I always worry that there’s a better way of doing it. But one of the great things about coding/game design is that there’s no absolute rule for everything. If it works it works. And it does what I intended it to do. No problems so far, except for other bugs such as the melee weapon not doing damage at certain times. Will fix them as they come.
GoldenGratus Games 