Begin working on Adventure Game

I added some Target lock on and camera tracking. I changed the implementation of the lock on to be something a bit quicker/more lose sheerly out of ease of getting something working. This gif nicely captures just about everything I fiddled on for the duration of this project. Could’ve been more with a little bit extra focus but i’ve learned stuff and thats what counts!

a longer video link

I suppose i’m calling it done with this. I didn’t nearly put as much time into this project but most of that time at least was spent on my other dk30 project with illustrating. I think lesson learned here is just focus on one thing at a time. With this dk30 over though I think i’m putting my focus back here over drawing and just playing around with ideas rather than going gung-ho into created a finished game/product or anything like that.

I spent today working on a camera lock on function mimic what windwaker does with the letterboxing and zoom. This is all getting me to poke around all the UE stuff around character controllers and im supremely impressed at just how much expected functionality is built in and available to plug in to vs what Unity has. The characterMovement class that comes attached to pawns in UE have switches and knobs for just about all the usual stuff that you want to work with, its just a matter of finding where it lives. Beats having to build it all from scratch in Unity.

Here’s a nicer quality webm of my test so far

But since gifs play nicely here, I trimmed the video down a bit to play here.

Spent some time hooking up the model and animation to an actual player controller. I’m focusing hard on dropping my desire to make everything my own from scratch and just leverage some prebuilt stuff from the unreal marketplace. There’s a different but equally good feeling of having something just be a hodge podge of stuff tossed into a working thing, at least for now.

Next up I think I’m going to spend some time on smoothing out the movement and camera transitioning. Definitely not hitting my target of 8 hours a week, maybe more like 4 - 6 but I’m still making progress nonetheless

Life and work took priority while this project went to the backseat over the past couple days.

That said I was finally able to start working on getting the animation controller started and creating the blendspace for the walking/running.

I was laughing almost in disbelief at how easy it was to get going now with all the trouble I had just trying to import a character at the right scale.

So now I have this!!

Onwards and upwards to actually controlling this character now

The past week/end has been a real struggle. The rig and animations I had in blender weren’t anywhere near what I needed to work with in UE4 once I imported the fbx. I hit problems ranging from the rig scaling being off to just having the rig be named “armature” causing problems down stream after importing. All of this made the character microscopic and tore the rig asunder to be completely unworkable. Definitely way more issues than when I’ve done the same with Unity but all of it was really just the result of newbie gotchas that won’t be a problem anymore now that I know. But man this first attempt was a struggle.

That said, I have a working model and animations in UE4 now!!!

Next up is now to build out the player controller blueprint and hook up the animations to the movement.

I was originally going to pull in an asset from the UE marketplace to deal with all the character movement and animation which I did get in but after rethinking I decided to go back and do it myself from scratch.

I did this for two reasons, 1. there’s an urge inside of me to always do things myself regardless of how smart (or not) it is, and 2. I figured the point of this dk30 should really be to learn the tools I want to use rather than just sprint to having some sort of output.

So with all that, I pulled up a little wip character I’ve been had dormant in blender for the past few weeks (looking at my other illustration dk30 project, you can see the idea I have running in my brain right now with this character :P ) and picked up where I left off, doing some weight painting and then I spent the past two hours animating an idle state and a run! Half of the exercise has been learning how to animate this thing properly and the other half is learning how to not waste all my time on the littlest of details that aren’t even going to be permanent.

But here’s what I got!

Im starting with a bit of a foundation from earlier this year. I first started diving into water shaders, trying to get nice wavey water. That led to a huge rabbit hole of what I discovered to be “Gerstner Waves” which turned out to be much fancier than simple sin wave waves. That also led to dealing with buoyancy since it was around the same effort as faking boats floating.

All of that I started in Unity until I saw assets on the UE marketplace solving all of the same problems without all of the work.So now I have something currently looking like this

Next up is to focus on character movement which, in the interest of learning UE 4 blueprints rather than struggle through it all for the heck of it, I’ve found some another asset package to solve movement that i’m going to import, shear back to the basics, and then work on getting my own character and rigging in place.