...Dev Log...

Sorry I haven't been posting a lot lately, I've been making the megastructure that's going to house the first city in my game. Working name so far is Stellaria, but I'm sure I'm going to rename that later.

There are still a lot of things to work on, and even this took all day, and there's not even any people in the city yet e.e

Once it's fully made as a city I'm going to fine tune it and add the actual story to it. Or that's the plan for right now, anyway. First I gotta make it less erie to look at.

So for the whole weekend I've been struggling with making the chests save your inventory when you change levels. Master Inventories came with base chest blueprints, but for some reason they don't save the chest they just spawn another one, so the more you visit the level the more chests will appear.

In an effort not to make massive piles of chests, I decided to make my own. They're children of the placeable objects, so you can put them down in the world. Unfortunately, they determine what chest they are based on location, so I'm probably goig to have them not be pick-upable when they've got things in them. Still a win.

I tested it on a bunch of levels, and it worked on all of them, so now there's chests with items that you can collect in the world.

the other thing I did was started a blockout of the first city, so that's got me excited. That's what the end of teh video is :P

okay, so one thing I want to have the player be able to do in this game is come across houses that they can claim for themselves. Kinda like what skyrim does, where you do the town's quest and then you can buy property.

The system I've spent all day working on is that you have an object in your inventory (the star thing in the video), you place it in an unclaimed house, the house spawns a bed and stove and some chests. You can place items in the house, that part is easy, it's basically a slightly more advanced campsite.

What isn't easy is getting the thing to save whether it's your house or not. I've got it to where it can recognize that it's your house and it spawns in all the furniture, but you can never un-claim it as your house for some reason. The next time you visit the level the furniture is all still spawned in and usable. I need the player to have a single, established home because that's where the story characters are going to gather.

I guess all I can do is keep working on it, I mean the house spawns stuff in and that's half the battle so maybe I can figure out the rest tomorrow.

In other news I added a sprint with it's own animation, and brought back the aiming while you arent holding a gun as a sort of focus thing. When you're aiming the character slows down to a walk. I like this idea of having three different speeds, walking jogging, and sprinting, so you can enjoy the game at whatever pace you choose. I feel like games like that give me a chance to stop adn smell the roses if I find something cool I want to take in. Also I just like video games where teh characters feel like they can relax if they want to.

Okay that was a struggle.

I abslutely did the whole thing over again I don't know what I was thinking with the array of structures. Two arrays, one ofintegers and one of transforms, ended up being the easiest solution. It took me a little bit of time, but I got it to work!

So now when you go through a door, it saves the world that you're in and the chapter that the world is on, and in a seperate array it saves a position for the doorway you just used. With this, when you comeback to that world it opens both arrays to the same index number, and loads the chapter it finds there adn puts the player at the potion that it has saved.

Since I made this in just a blank level and made it use persistent level streaming, when I want to make a new level I can just dupicate this one and set the base level t load whatever place I just made. They'll all have loading screens, they'll all save your spot and chapter, you can just copy and paste and tell teh newly pasted level what world number it is.

The first world you see in the video is the original, but the second world taht i travel to was made in like a matter of seconds. The town and village arent mine, I got those from an asset, but the level itself has all teh functionality that I just spent all this time making. Setting up the towns and everything is still going to be difficult, but once they exist I can literally just throw them into a blank persitence level and every door I place on the map will work perfectly.

I know it probably doesn't sound like a huge deal, but to me it is.

The other things that I did that I was pretty excited about is with the enemy AI's, I changed their roaming behavior, so now before they wander aimlessly they look to see if there's any target points on the map first. This is neatbecause I can throw a target point anywhere I want the NPC's to gather, like in a restaurant or a town market or something. The NPC's will pick a random spot to go hang out, they'llrandomly mill about there for a little bit, then they'll pick a nre target point and go to that and repeat the process. I'm going to give them random emotes too so they look like they're wakling around town doing things.

They've got a new random skeletal mesh picker, so they'll switch skins as you drag them out to the world, which is nice because I don't want to hand-design all of them. I'll just make a wardrobe of tops adn bottoms and heads and hairstyles and have it randomly choose who looks like what. Right now it's just cycling through the three skins I was using for testing protagonists earler this year.

The dialogue system needs work. I can't figure out why it's wrapping weird on some parts and not others, and I had already deleted out the line she was saying when it did that, so I don't know what happened there.

None of the buildings or characters are lore accurate yet, I was mainly just trying to see how hard it would be to get the building generator to work if I fed it all teh house pieces from the asian village asset pack I have. I'm still planning on using Blender to make a modular kitbash to make the real buildings. That's coming along pretty nicely.

I'm really happy with how it's coming along. My goal is to get all the gameplay features working to a point where it's as easy as making an RPG Maker game, then start adding the world and lore and stuff. This is so much further than I ever thought I'd get, and to be perfectly honest my dream of making a video game died in college when I failed out of computer science. So yeah, this kind of stuff makes me irrationally happy, haha.

I won't be able to work on it all weekend, I'll be out of town again, but check in for more posts next week!

I did end up coming up wiht a fix to the level system, so that was good. You interact with a door, it can take you to as new place, you can complete a mission that changes the new place. That was more or less what I had the first time around, so that's good. The problem is that when you go a new place, I can't get it to place you where you should go, instead it just either spawns your character in the center of the level or off into oblivion.

This all came about because I thought I had come up with a clever way for the game to keep track of where the player should spawn the next time they visit a place, but I think I ended up overreaching a bit.

Still though, the idea of chapters in each city is back on the table, which is good, because that was something I wanted since the begining. An unfortunate thing I learned though was that apparently you can't use persistent level editting with partitioned worlds, meaning I can't make chapters for my overwolrd the same way I could for smaller towns. I could think of something to get around that, but for right now I'm willing to accept that. I'm still going to mix both ideas, and just keep track of where to use one or the other.

Okay not totally broken, I'm just being dramatic because I'm frusterated.

Sorry there isn't an accompanying video for this one, it's not really something I can video. I wanted to change the way he save game works because I'm starting to work on the city life mechanics, and because I wanted to make things a little cleaner.

Like an absolute bufoon I changed an array of int's to an array of structs and the whole day was lost tracking down how many functions I'd broken. I really do need those integers to be structures though, it's the only way I can think of for teh game to remeber where to spawn the player in each individual level.

So I will persist! I'm probably going to have to discard the level-progression system I had already made and find a way to integrate a new one. I'll keep yall posted.

Sorry I haven't been posting a lot, I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to make the cities. I know how they're going to work lore-wise, but actually putting them together is another story.

When I first set out on this project, I tried a couple of different things. I have about a zillion asset packs for buildings, but the problem with them is that they don't have uniform art styles, so it's a bit jarring to look at them next to each other. I thought maybe I could pick one and make adjustments to it in blender or something, then I had the thought that I could just use Blender and make my own modular setup. And that was the plan until like Monday, when I actually tried it.

Making the modular assets in itself isn't hard, I've got plenty of experience with 3D modelling, but then I tried assembling a building. And that also wasn't difficult, but it took all day and I had one building and I looked at the block-out I had made and was like "dear god, this is the part that takes years…" and I know me, so I know that this could be where I got lazy if I wasn't careful.

So what I did instead was looked at procedural building creators on Fab. I already had a free one and I spent a day or two trying to get it to work, and I couldn't place a single building so I went out and found another one. That's the one I'm using in the video, and it works pretty good. I haven't put any of my own walls and windows and things like that in it yet, I'll probably spend today making them or something. I kind of just wanted to find out what the city would feel like if it was generated. The buildings in it right now are not lore accurate.

There's going to be a lot of buildings I need to manually make still, like things for the story I'll definitely want to have more deliberately designed, but this is a huge help because now I can just plan out the city layout and placements more than where the windows are and if the curtains match the carpet in every room.

So oversheilds were always a part of my main vision for this game, but I also wanted you to me able to place them in your campsite and get a safe zone. I'm happy with the bulletproof bubble that makes enemies leave, I want to maybe turn down teh opacity on teh personal bubble so you can still see your character when you're fighting, but I have no idea if that's possible yet.

I know other games have overshield mechanics and I know that they look very different from mine. I like the bubble aesthetic, and I like the idea that you can get various sheilds that are going to look different and have different visual effects as you play. Also I very much wanted the "place the sheild on the ground and get a safe area" mechanic, though I'll probably have you use a consumable everytime you do it, like a battery. Some way to make it mainly a thing for resting and making safe areas and less of a thing for use in combat. Although I guess it might be interesting to let this be a thing that people can just set up in the middle of battle and deploy like bubble sheilds in halo. I don't know yet.

My overshields are basically completely inspired by the Dune books. They stop bullets, but not melee.This was more or less to control the flow of combat so that every battle didn't just end with ranged enemies being the only ones that mattered adn melee enemies being nothing but cannon fodder. If guns are nerfed a bit by shields, then the low ttk swords get a lot more dangerous.

The way it's set up now when an enemy approaches it it changes their behavior so they run for the hills and then despawn. I don't know if I'm going to keep it like that, because then if you do use it in battle anyone that overlaps it is essentially dead. It might work better to have the enemies just run from it. When I tried that though they didn't run all that far away, and they change back to hostile as soon as they hear you. Then they rush teh bubble, and the whole process repeats itself. I guess that might be more realistic?

I'm not sure yet. But, this game is at least starting to look like what I want it to, and that makes me happy.

I found a neat way to let gave the enemies a chance to either block the player's attack or dodge backwards using random numbers. It's been a bit tricky, adn I think something I did messed up my ranged attack enemies because now they aren't doing anything. Stuff to fix tomorrow, I suppose.

I also set the NPC's to randomly drop loot. The loot dropped falls into three teirs so far: common, rare, and legendary. Not that I've made a lot of different types of loot yet.

Unfortunately that introduced a completely new problem that I have no idea how to fix.

When there's too much loot dropped on the ground the frame rates tank. I didn't make the item picking-up and inventory system, so I don't know how it works or what parts of it are totally necessary. In short, I don't know what I can trim without breaking it. I'll do some digging through the documentation, but the framerate definitely only drops when the loot is being spawned in or overlapped, and when it's turned off it works fine.

I'll try a few tricks, but I don't really know anything about optimizing and since it's such a boring process I havent' really found a ton of tutorials on it.

for now though, I've got melee enemies who's health, damage, and attack patterns change with their levels, they dodge and block attacks, and even if they can't drop loot that's a pretty big win.

Another thing I did that I completely forgot to put in the video was I made an enemy spawner that is activated by sound, so you can sneak past it and it won't start spawning enemies until it hears you. I've got a bit ofa stealth mechanic (Actually I don't think I've ever showcased that either) where you can crouch and move silently. That's what I had in mind when I was making this spawner. So that's neat too.

I know this one doesn't look super impressive but I started working on character levels. Enemies have a list of attacks and the higher their levels the more attack patterns they have.

With this setup I can also (hopefully) give them more logic and behaviors that unlock at different levels.

That health bar is supposed to also reflect their level, but for some reason it isn't showing it, I'm still working on that...

I'm lowkey embarassed by how long this one took.

Over the weekend I got the melee problem figured out, so now one melee strike damages all enemies in front of you, but only does it once (unless you spam attack and combo them). So that was nice.

Today I wanted to work on the reload system. I had it set up to where you just push a button and it resets the bullet counter, but I wanted a general purpose magazine that (for lore reasons) would be usable in other situations and on other things.

This took the better part of all day and a decent chunk of yesterday, until I finally realized I was trying too hard to make it work like a real gun. The fix came to me literally a few minutes before I was about to call it quits, and it works pretty well.

The reload system relies on disposable batteries (again, it's a lore thing) so instead of hitting R and just grabbing the next one from your inventory, I wanted the player to be able to designate a stack of them to use as weapon magazines. So, I set them up as items you can find and then stacks you can split, and wrote heir "Use" function to consume themself and be used in the player to allow the weapon to reload.

This means that you can put them in your hotbar adn then the hotkey that they're on effectively becomes your new reload button. You can split stacks and put as many magazines as you want in there to use in battle without having to worry about burning through all of them if you need them for other things.

I'm pretty happy with how it turend out, I might still do some tweaking on it.

Okay, so today I added a weapon combo setup that would work with my system of weapons holding their own attack animations, and that was fairly easy, but I also tried to fix the weapon collisions. Previously, the only enemy that took damage was the first one the weapon touched, so if you were surrounded adn tried to do a spin attack you'd only get one enemy. I was trying to fix that.

The problem is that I need some way for the attack to not just continuously cause damage as it's passing through an enemy, or every single attack is a one-shot kill no matter what the damage on teh weapon is set to. I need the attack to pass through each enemy and know whether or not it's already damaged that enemy.

I'm currently trying to get it to set up an array of all the people who get hit in a swing, and then apply the damage to them after it has teh full list. the problem is, when it distributes taht damage is suddenly a big deal, because it if damages them after the swing, then you have to wait until the attack ends before anyone actually dies. If you do it too early, liuke during the swing, then it won't register everyon who got hit in the attack adn you have enemies that aren't taking any damage.

I'm going to look at it again fresh tomorrow and maybe I can figure out how the animation notifies work, maybe there's a solution in there somewhere. I know I was initially using them in teh sword attacks, but I didn't really understand how to access them. That might ahve the solution though. WHo knows?

Way better day today.

I fiddled around with the enemy AI things adn with a fresh pari of eyes I got them moving how I wanted them too. It's not perfect yet, but they step out of cover, shoot a few times, and then run back to cover, and that's pretty solid if they're all ganging up on one player.

The other thing that I added was the charisma system! I'm sure this has been done before but I've never seen it, but basically I want a system where you can lie your way into a fortress instead of fighting or sneaking. Like Arataka Reigen in the first season of Mob PSycho 100.

Basically, when an enemy sees you, it starts a timer. If you emote in that time, there's a virtual D20 that gets rolled, and the enemy NPC with the highest charisma check sets the value that you have to beat. If you beat the value, the NPC thinks you're both on the same team. There's going to be other stuff too, like things that advance with your level and ways that the NPC can be manipulated but the barebones of teh mechanic is basically that. And thats' what I got programmed in today. The purple melee NPC in teh start of the video is the one I;m trying to trick. The first time I fail, but the second time i succeed and he just goes back to doing whatever he was doing.

I don't have it set up to work in crowds yet, but that's where the idea is going. I'm pretty excited about this mechanic.

Didn't get quite as far as I'd hoped today, I mostly messed around with the enemy AI mechanics, but I can't get them to feel realistic in a large scale battle. Might need to do some Youtube research for that one.

I did however go back through the controller adn clean up the bowl of spaghetti that was my equipment functions, so now they all look pretty and are easier to troubleshoot. I did that because I was wanting to add an equippable oversheild, and while I;m pretty happy with teh oversheild pack I got, I also need it to add a new health bar, so I figured I'd try and clean things up so that it could do that. The mess you see in the upper left hand corner is the result of trying to have 4 bars up there lolol.

I was pretty excited for the overshields, and I forgot to show it in the video but I made them so they dissapear in first person that way you aren't trying to aim though wavey lines.

I knew my combat additions and such were goign to be super difficult to get to work, so I'm a little frusterated about the AI mechanics but I'm not discouraged! I'll figure out how to get them to act like real people, then I'll add what I;m really excited for: a charisma and stealth system!

Okay, so I've really only dabbled in setting up enemies so far, so I was a bit shakey on this all day. HOWEVER! I did end up figuring out how to use an EQS in teh existing AI trees that came with the enemies i got.

I've had these cheap standard issue enemy AI for a hot minute now, adn on their ow they're pretty decent (think Skyrim enemies) butI wanted to beef them up a little bit and potentially get them to work together. I think taht could be pretty cool.

So I learned how to make an EQS (enviromental query system) and I figured out how to get it to play well with the enemies. This is still just baby steps, I spent most of the day trying to get the AI's to actually use the EQS, because they'd already been coded to do something else.

For now though, I have programmed the melee enemies to run for their lives once their health drops below a certain point, and I've programmed the ranged enemies to actually seek you out when you hide from them instead of strafing until they can draw a bead on you. I'm still messing around with them because I want them to run to cover when they reload as well.

The eventual goal here is that I'll be able to have smart enemies and stage a large-scale battle. I'm still working out how that could work adn feel cool in a game.

Today I mainly worked on the first person shooter aspects of things. Turns out it's pretty difficult to make a first person shooter. But then, I was never doing this because I thought it'd be easy.

Among the plethora of assets I've gotten from unreal engine marketplace (before it became fab.com) was this procedural maze generator and these enemy AI characters. I found out how to get them to work together ages ago, and they've kind of turned into my battlefeild for testing out the combat mechanics I've been programming in.

The melee stuff is fairly easy from a third person perspective, but getting it to not look jankey as hell in the first person mode is something I still haven't quite figured out yet. I was honestly just so happy to figure out how to get the character to aim down the sights, and I still might redo that if I find a good tutorial on youtube. My little homebrew setup works, but as you probably noticed it's a bit snappy in the movements.

I like the self generating mazes, and I'm planning on having them be little side-quest areas all over the overworld with their own little flavors and unique quirks. For now though, yeah it makes an excellent testing ground to see if the game I'm trying to make is fun at all.

Next thing to work on is oversheilds so the ranged combatants stop killing me instantly!

This weekend I worked on combat mechanics. I made a way for the individual melee weapons to have their own attack animations, so I can add a sword and add it's attacks and have them be bound to that specifc weapon. So like the axe will always slash and the mace will always spin-attack. This means the individual weapons you find in the game will have different attack styles.

I also made a lock-on system and set it up so that it only works in melee, so you can lock onto enemies with the right mouse button and your character will focus on them. I might have it set up like Zelda where when you're locked on you're automatically blocking, since right now it's a hold-down button to keep blocking. This (hopefully) makes it easier to disengage and re-engage with different enemies if you're in danger of being surrounded.

I added a roll mechanic, so that when you're locked onto an enemy you can roll out of the way of their attacks like in a soulsborne game. Not sure yet if I want you to be temporarily invincible when you're rolling.

And finally, at my lil bro's recomendation I added a first person toggle. Holy shit did that immediately become more than I expected. My weapon firing logic was immediately useless so I need to come up with a whole new system for using guns, and the melee attacks move so fast that you can't really see them in the first person mode, also not all the attacks (like the mace spin attack) are even where the first person camera can see them, so I tried a few things for how to fix that but I think it's going to take some messing around.

I am pretty happy with how things are going so far though. The melee combat isn't perfect, but it's fun and it has the potential to be pretty fluid. What I've really been excited for is the enemies, and things I want to try with the AI.

Sorry I didn't post yesterday! My house is falling apart and that needed to be addressed before I could continue.

I've got the tent down pretty good I think, it saves your game, speeds up time until morning, and I'm going to have it be a bit of a healing thing too. Also, you can hold down interact and it packs itself up. If you hold down interact on teh campfire it puts itself out, the lighter has infinite uses so you can place campfires as you please (although I will have a durability feature to simulate running out of lighter fluid or something).

Making the tent skip time was legitamately what took all day. I had to change wht whole sky because the day and night asset I was using didn't react to time dilation, meaning the whole world sped up but the sun and moon didn't go any faster. Now it does, I think I;m going to have a cutscene or cinematic or something to show your character in the tent reading a book and sleeping while the night passes. I think that'd be cool.

Most of the other stuff on the camping can't really be done without more of the combat mechanics up and running, so I guiess that's what's next. There's an infinite amount of blls and whistles I want this game to have, but the main core of teh gameplay is what I'm working on first. I probably should have started with the combat now that I think about it, but I didn't realize how serious about this I was going to get until about a month ago.

Today I made progress, but it felt like things are going kinda slow. When I made the character modular so I could change his clothes it also negated his ability to take damage, so I spent all morning trying to get him to take damage again.

After that I set up a camp system so you can place a campfire anywhere, but you can only place a tent in a certain radius around the campfire. The campfire is the powerhouse of the camp. There's going to be a number of other things you can place around the campsite, like solar chargers and shield generators, but for now I'm kinda focusing on the basics.

I have the campfire itself open a crafting station when you interact with it (I forgot to record me doin that) so you can cook things, but the tent I wanted to do a bit more with. I want the tent to be a savepoint as well as a respawn anchor, and I also wanted it to skip to daytime when you slee, like what minecraft does with beds. I got it to mostly work, but the problem is that when I respawn, the campsite doesn't respawn with me.

Turns out you have to manually choose what gets saved and loaded when you're making a game, so I have to come up with a variable setup that tells the game what was in camp and where it all was placed, and I think I'm probably need a system to keep track of every campsite the player places, so that when they make a camp and abandon it it doesn't just despawn the next time they die. Or maybe it'd be better if it did? I don't know yet.

For now though, I have a camp setup. You cam place a campfire with a lighter, you can place a tent around the campfire. Sleeping in a tent will probably also have some extra effects, like healing or something depending on teh tent you find. I really like the idea of a campsite being like base you can set up in the overworld, in case you want to really explore an area hard and have somewhere to head back to, or make a little advance position for like an attack or ambush or something. Camping in the overworld was a pretty big part of the initial vision of gameplay mechanics when I was daydreaming this whole thing.

I'm back home and back on the grind! I finished the character and the clothing assets this morning, so that was nice. I can tune it up later, but basically now I have acharacter that doesn't glow in the dark, you can change their outfit and hair (I'm going to try to have a workstation for the hair though, maybe like when you interact with a bathroom mirror or something? Idk it felt weird to make that a pickup), and it's hopefully adroginous enough that you can customize them to present male or female.

I'm goingto have a shitton of customization options because playing dress up is one of my favorite things to do in a video game. I love customizing things XP

Did some more work on the placement system, I remember in college my friends all agve me shit because I would spend hours in Fallout 4 trying to painstakingly organize all my guns on a shelf. That game didn't have a placement mechanic for random crap you find in the overworld, but this one will. I love games that entail collecting stuff, and I love games that let you hoard all that stuff somewhere! ^w^

I set up a system that can tell when you're placing a tent or a pickup object, so you can deploy tents but still aslo drop them from your inventory without them just turning into full-sized tents.

Also realized Hope's vroid doesn't work nearly as well in UE5 as Pride's did, so I'll probably try to make a protagonist character next! Character creation systems are super frigging hard from what I've seen online, and there aren't really any goo assets that you can buy online to do it for you, so I think I'll have a super androngenous protagonist that you can change the outfits and hairstyles and things for. But that's for next time! :P