I have fixed my issue of not being able to package my game with plugins. After looking online I knew the issue was with my game running purely through blueprints. I looked around but couldn’t find a concrete answer on how to fix it, at least no easy way. The loading screen plugin has a very helpful support page that I was looking through. One of his tips was to add a C++ class to the project. So I did that, making sure I updated my visual studio which I haven’t done in a while. Once that was all done I could finally package the game with the plugin. Now I have a loading screen and I could take off all my clunky code for the crappy loading screen I had. It works perfectly and I feel like I somehow go more performance from whatever change happened from adding some C++ in the project. That doesn’t make sense because I didn’t do anything with it, but the game is deniably smoother.
After I was able to get that working I wanted to see if I could bring back something I had in the game months ago but removed because of the packaging issues. It was the apex destructible plugin that created fractured meshes for objects. It made the objects break in awesome ways and I hated removing it. I enabled the plugin, put a destructible mesh in the game, and then I packaged the game with cross fingers. It packaged perfectly. The next step was replacing the code within the objects to make the destructible system work with it then update all my objects across the levels to show the right fractured object. It didn’t take too long. Thankfully I don’t have that many varied objects per level. I could easily edit multiple at a time.
This was a great step forward that I probably could have done sooner if I had realized how simple it was. But now I can be less afraid of adding and using plugins in my game. I did some research into getting reduced package sizes. This is important for the future when I have all my stages in one package. I need to cut any unnecessary fat in my game eventually. The demo I uploaded to steam was too big for what it contained.
I then went back to the link of where all the free sounds were and downloaded the first three years of files because I only had the three recent years. I will go through those sounds soon and sort them like I did last time. Another small but important change I made was adding a button to enable or disable the subtitles. There’s not a lot of voice lines but they are present, so at least I could put a setting just in case.
Finally I started working on the story for the fifth stage and I think it’s gonna be my best one yet. I always try to top the most recent stage I did. But I think this one may be the most interesting. I have done some relevant research into topics such as cremation and how ashes can be turned into diamonds. They have to filter out the carbon from the ashes and it goes to other processes. From filtration to flotation. Then the carbo is pressed in some big complicated machine. It’s very cool and quite interesting. All this research is important to the story of my fifth stage where I want to have some technical truths engrained into the fantasy world.
GoldenGratus Games 