15 hours a week of Gamedev!

Another DK30 in the books!

I started with a goal of 10 hours and bumped it to 15 knowing that even if I didn’t hit that, I’d at least have the push to keep doing more. I normally run DK30’s with a specific goal/output in mind and while I think focusing on just the hours I put in worked a bit more smoothly, I think I could’ve done better by spending time on planning specific objectives that I wanted to aim for as a result of the hours put in, rather than just work aimlessly for a set period of time.

Hours per week: Week 1 - 14:45 Week 2 - 13:20 Week 3 - 12:42 Week 4 - 13;23

So what did I learn: Audio in UE4, Ableton and how to scrap together a simple beat, Menu navigation in UE4 (and with controller input!), Decals in UE4, and continued practice with the workflow of modelling/animating from Blender to UE4.

To wrap it up, I recorded a ~40 sec clip covering just about everything over the DK30! https://i.imgur.com/IslbMTt.mp4

I missed making an update for Week 3 but I still got hours in so i’ll cover both!

Week 3: Hit 12.5 hours. I was trying to redo some animations and fix some of the bone weights. What was supposed to be an hour or two of cleanup turned into a whole week of me redoing animations and re-rigging my characters. As always, I’m getting better at animating/rigging, plus the things are better off now.

Week 4: Hit 13.5 hours. Partly a continuation of week 3, updating animations. Otherwise I redid the models for the main bearguy and then the deergirl character. Then just a lot of cleanup for the NPC blueprints and the animation blueprints to get it all working again.

I did also learn about decals in UE4. The idea was to try and make a neon-bright indicator for walls that the player can wall run on without modelling and texturing a specialized mesh for it everytime.

Week 2: just shy of the new 15 hours goal. Hit 13.5 hours this week!

This week has been me figuring out audio. Specifically working with UE4’s audio setup, and getting things like volume levels hooked up into the UI for the pause menu.

This also resulted in me learning my way around ableton again as well and making little sound effects and a super simple music beat. It’s all together in action in the clip below! https://i.imgur.com/BdENBBh.mp4

I’ve been bogged down in UI and audio stuff for the past two or three weeks so now I can move back to more fun general-gamedesign stuff.

1 week down! Even with a full 5 days of job work, I was able to squeeze out a little over 14 hours on this project. Pair that with the fact that I’ll have 1 day off each week for the next 3 weeks, I’m going to bump my goal up to 15 hours a week.

So with those 14 hours I immersed myself in the pain that is trying to get controller navigation to work with Unreal! Mouse navigation works exceptionally well out of the box but to handle controller input navigation seems non-existent and there seems to be a fine line between what you can force UE4 to do by default vs you just rolling out your own system for handling input and reflecting that in the UI. Long story short all of that result in the very simple pause menu seen below!

First proper update! I’ve been putting a consistent 2 hours a day-ish during the week so I might bump my goal to 15 hours in the later half of the dk30.

With those hours though, I’ve been working on a dialogue system!

It handles fast forwarding text, simple yes/no dialogue options, and even waits on little events like paying coins for an item. It’s a bit of a mess as I’ve never built something like this but it’s functional for now!

As for the dk30 goal of hitting hours, I’m using a site called Toggl to track time. It has a super simple browser extension button that I can click and quickly track time without getting lost in the weeds of too many details. It even gives nice little graphs like this one!

This game has has been a project that I’ve been working on and started 2 DK30’s ago back at the start of 2020. It started with the goal of being a Stealth game, slowly transformed towards an action adventure game, and now i’ve scaled it back to just be a little collectathon game that I hope to finish in the next month or two!

Here’s a little bit of where it’s at so far!