Prototype v1.2

For this version, I have finalized my player movement and abilities, all combat mechanics, enemy behavior, as well as combat and movement tutorial levels while also starting development on the ‘arena’ mode. This is part of the main pivot that I have made in between this and the last prototype version. As more and more of my time has been spent on making the mechanics feel as polished as I can, I fear I won’t have enough time to make a fully fledged continuous level. This is why I am going forward with making an ‘arena mode’, where the player will be placed in a medium sized map where they must survive as long as they can against a progressively increasing number of enemies that spawn. Stats like enemies killed and time survived will be tracked for high scores. I’m confident that I can have the base functionality for this up by the next playtest so I will be asking the playtesters for possible iterations on this mode such as; waves, power-up orbs, scaling enemy health and damage, or player stat upgrades.

Deflect ability

Some other visual additions, as seen above, are; first person two handed sword arm animations, projectile and hit vfx, take damage screen effect, and lastly new ability icons with cooldown animations. I still plan on adding additional vfx for things like; sword swing, dash trail, and a fast moving lines screen effect as well as integrating isolated left arm animations for the grapple and blast ability casting. As of right now, I’m still not sure what direction I want to take the environment art-wise as I am leaning away from my previous idea moving into this new arena game mode. One hurdle I am facing with the art implementation is finding an arm asset that is rigged to the unreal engine 5 skeleton that isn't upwards of $30. This is causing me to consider making the sort of test dummy/robot arms that the character currently has be a part of the game's aesthetic, but I still need to come up with a clever enough way to do that.

Blast ability

Since the arena mode is not yet playable, the only goals in the current state of the game are completing all of the challenges in the movement and combat tutorial levels. The movement and combat system I have made are fairly intricate so I personally enjoy messing around with them to try and find new ways to defeat enemies or move around the map more efficiently even just in these tutorial levels. It can take a second to really get the hang of the mechanics and I think that these tutorial zones are a great space to do so for new players. These levels are easy to load and replay by entering them from the main menu then returning to the main menu from the pause screen (shown below), but I plan on adding a button to refresh the level (at least to respawn the enemies in the combat tutorial) at some point in the near future.

Main menu and pause menu   

Other than some slight bugs when trying to package the latest version of the project, I have had a pretty smooth experience programming so far for this project. There's been a couple notable things that I've had to learn within unreal engine programming to make this project possible. First would be how to use AI behavior trees more in depth, using sub trees and state managers, and have them interact with the AI perception blueprint component to create fluid enemies that feel responsive. Second would be, how creating blueprint interfaces and components can help with making your code more modular and applicable to multiple actor types, this can be seen in my damage system. The damage system, comprised of a blueprint interface,  blueprint component, state enumerator, and damage info struct, acts as a container for various damage related functions as well as managing the state of any actor that has this component on them. For instance, this is used to tell the game things like when a projectile is able to be deflected or deal damage as well a when an enemy is interrupted and stunned when hit but the player isn't.

Overall, I am very happy with the place this project is at right now and am super excited to get a more substantial game mode to place these mechanics in. Stay tuned!