Welcome back readers!
The last time we talked, I mentioned how excited I was to be assigned to a project that involves making a video game, specifically, an Escape Room. Since then, my team and I have been busy planning out our respective rooms, puzzles, game features, and every conceivable detail as much as possible while creating our project plan. We were undecided at that time, as to which Game engine to use going forward and much to my happiness, we decided on Unreal Engine! I mentioned last time we spoke that I have more experience with that engine than with Unity. Additionally, as part of creating the project plan, we also delegated tasks to each other for every week until the end of the quarter. This way, we will know what we need to get done and it gives us a sense of structure and urgency. Throughout the process of planning the puzzles and making a mock up of my room I could feel myself getting more and more excited to begin creating something awesome. My tasks for this week involve implementing features that will be used by the player across all the levels.
For this week, I won’t be working so much on my puzzles but more on global features that will be part of the player’s capabilities. These include the ability to pick up objects in the world and move or throw them around, as well as an inventory system that implements stacking behavior, consumption of items, moving items around, dropping them back into the world, as well as removing/storing items from containers. It’s a lot of work and I’m looking forward to and excited for the experience I will gain in Unreal C++ programming as well as with Blueprints. I found an awesome tutorial that I’ve been following along with that is complex but implements a very flexible inventory system when finished.
I will use this system as a base for our game, and tweak it to suit our needs. For example, adding dropping functionality for our game will be a fun thing to play around and challenge myself with. I’ve already gone wayyy past the 10 hours per week requirement for this course and did so without even thinking about it. Coding and developing games is my passion and hopefully where I will end up career-wise so it hardly felt like work. The video above and the udemy course I mentioned in the last video have both been extremely helpful in this first week’s tasks and great practice with both C++ and Blueprints in the Unreal environment. Though learning the inventory did take up the majority of my time this week, I did manage to make a bit of progress on my first puzzle.
https://www.udemy.com/course/unrealcourse/
My first puzzle is going to involve the player looking around the room and finding a hidden pressure plate. With some experimentation and patience, the player will realize that standing on that part of the floor makes the bars blocking a door recede into the ground. The trick is that the weight must remain on the spot for the bars to stay down. Using different objects around the room with various masses, the player will have to stack them to retract the bars and make progress on that part of the puzzle. For now, that is the only hint I am going to give…I invite you to play our game when it’s complete!
Until next time readers!
