...Dev Log...

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