Hello again readers!
When last we met, my team and I had assigned ourselves tasks for every week of the term in order to have a working project by the end. Since that time I have worked on a substantial number of features and am quite happy with where I am at this point in time. I made progress on my first puzzle, completed the inventory system that I mentioned to you last time, and took the plunge into opening and playing around in Blender. I’ll start by describing the inventory system features I worked on and the stuff for my first puzzle.
The tutorial I linked to in my last blog post was quite extensive but I managed to implement it into our project. I was holding my breath as my teammates cloned the updated project because I wasn’t sure that the inventory system would work for them. This worry came from the fact that I initially created the inventory system in a different project since at the time we did not have the shared repo created. I then migrated it to my local instance of our repository and…it broke. I had no idea why this happened but I had to delete the files and try again. This time I migrated it in pieces and thankfully it ended up working on both my local machine and my teammates’ cloned projects. I have several times made little tweaks to the inventory system like adding a Drop Item button and the related functionality and these changes have worked for all of us as well. With this hurdle out of the way I was able to relax a bit and begin working on my first puzzle.
My first puzzle is quite simple in how it functions but it involves certain objects like a shovel and pile of sand which would be a challenge to find on their own as downloadable meshes. With this in mind, I began looking at tutorials on Blender and learning how it works. I have to say, the number of features, overviews, and tweaking options in Blender is quite overwhelming. I do feel I am slowly starting to get the hang of it though…and I am happily spending at least 5 hours a day on the project so I am making significant progress too. Part of my resources in learning Blender is a udemy course that I actually purchased in 2016 but had not explored much of.
https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/
Blender may be overwhelming right now but I am determined to learn it because the idea of being able to make my own meshes, with their own textures applied and import them into my game development projects is very exciting to me. I did manage to fashion a shovel and a compass in Blender and was able to import them into Unreal with appropriate scale too. These were basic shapes of course, I am certain fashioning the canopic jars and Egyptian busts for my room will be tougher but I am hoping that most of the logic for my puzzles will be completed early so I’ll have a few weeks to work on modeling.
I am really hoping that by the end of this term, my level of the project will be something that is impressive enough to stand out in my Github portfolio. As I’ve mentioned before, it would be a dream come true to work on video game programming as a career and I am hoping this game will help me stand out when the time for making applications comes.
Until next week readers!
