Hello once again readers,
I can’t believe there is less than a month left until the term ends! This quarter has been going by unbelievably fast and I think it has been this way because of how busy I’ve been and how much I have been learning. Every time I sit down to work on this project, I learn at least one new thing and often times more than one. For example, just since the last post I made, I learned in unreal what the GameInstance can be used for and how important it is in any game that has level transitions. As you can probably imagine, this includes most games.
Every week that I post, there is something new that I’ve learned in Unreal Engine or one of the technologies I’m using in conjunction with it. One of the most interesting things I learned about since we last talked is the GameInstance in Unreal. A developer can create their own GameInstance, as a Blueprint, and add variables to it that will be tracked between level changes. This has great utility for video games and is very easy to implement in Unreal. For our project, my next task according to our project plan was to implement a main menu and pause screen. This was easy enough to do as I had created widgets in the past, but a new challenge was to find a way for a difficulty setting (chosen in the main menu) to effect game play in subsequent levels. This was easily done using a GameInstance blueprint. I added variables to track score and chosen difficulty setting and was successfully able to reference them in my level after transitioning to it from the main menu! This means that whatever score the player has when they complete my level will persist into subsequent levels and can be built upon. It was pretty exciting to learn how GameInstance works and how important it is and unless I have the time and decide to implement another puzzle, this is the last foreseeable challenge I can see for my level. I am also glad to say that building the project for Windows was painless and upon testing it on my own platform worked seamlessly. I still think it would be cool to have the mummy move around and maybe create a dialogue system for increased interactivity with the player so within the next week or two I will definitely be researching the work required to implement that and if it can integrate with our existing systems nicely. I’m having a blast working on this project and it is definitely making the term fly by as well as being busy in my life when not working on it too.
I’m pretty busy these days when not working on the project as well. I work out 6 days a week and walk my dog 4 miles daily and take her to training every weekend. I try to cook something new every couple of weeks as well, last week I made homemade spaghetti sauce and next week I’m thinking of making pork tenderloin chili. Cooking has become one of my hobbies since moving into my own place in 2017. Another more recent hobby is playing around on a dj controller. I have a basic one, a Pioneer DDJ-400 and enjoy mixing tracks for friends or when I have a party at my place. With all of that, the project, and applying to jobs daily, I don’t have much time to get bored. I did hear back from one company and have a pending assessment to take on CodeSignal. It’s due march 1, so I will for sure do some research on what their assessment is like and what topics I should brush up on. I will keep you posted on what develops in life and in class readers.
Until next time,
-Navine
