With my newly obtained knowledge I dove back into the blueprints I had amassed from months on work on the player character. There was a lot to clean and organize. Sometime wires will overlap even if you try to be clean, but I had many unnecessary messes that I had to be diligent enough to sort out. I took some before and after pictures of the logic I made. A lot of it looks a lot better now that I paid attention to the cleanliness. There were a few bugs or logic failures I was able to catch and fix thanks to me going over the code itself over and over again.
A tip I got was to use macros if I’m doing something over and over again. Which I had already been doing before but I wasn’t doing it for some of the bigger functions I had. So I went back and created a macro and it saved a lot of space and will certainly save some time if I ever need to change some of the logic. Macros work great because all I have to do is change it, and it will apply to all the macros I used within the blueprints, it’s very similar to a function but it’s recommended if I know only that nothing else outside the blueprint needs it.
I went through all the graphs I had and it still surprises me how much I had done. Doing it and seeing it are vastly different experiences. Since I did it everyday and quite slowly it didn’t occur to me what the scale of it was. And this is only on the player’s side. There’s so much more on the other objects such as the boss, the UI, level, and physics actors.
Having cleaned up most of the code I’ve realized it’s time to stop adding any more mechanics. As a brand new developer I needed to have a rather small scope for my first project. I think I went a little overboard on the player. And the game itself is still a bit bigger in my head. What’s left to do for the player is merely refine the animations, and fix whatever bugs pop up. No more adding, it only adds more complications and there’s still a lot I have to improve that interacts with the player such as the world itself.
I always feel as if I have to add something to make great leaps in progress, but improving or cleaning up previous work is good progress on its own. I need to know when to tell myself that it is enough. So this is me saying that, there are enough moves and mechanics on the character. I may still remove the swinging since it is a bit wonky. My plan in the future is for the character to get special moves for the bosses defeated, but that’s only if I feel I have the capacity for it.
I have many ideas for the player model so I will take another crack at it, hopefully it will be a version I will use for awhile or maybe even forever. Then after that I have to improve the objects because they don’t break apart or shatter how I want them to. I know how I can improve them, I just have to do a lot of testing.
GoldenGratus Games 