Overview Of This Work

Over this month my whole dedication was to making my indie project and making it as good as possible. There have been many things that have been done for the game that can be discussed. But I think it’s better to discuss the journey of how I made a game that was amazing for me and how I started from no knowledge to having, in my opinion, a very good understanding of how blueprints work.

Play – Testing

Nearing my last week, I decided to play test my game by conducting an interview after 3 participants would finish playing. During gameplay I would offer assistance or use prods/ suggestions to the participant in order to try out a certain move. The results were very helpful. Even though the game wasn’t finished. It was very helpful to see what next steps to take to finish my game. I ended up having 28 questions with each session lasting around 30 minutes until it would end. I decided very early on in the development cycle that I would try to make a key mapping rebind table to add an element of accessibility to the game. The results showed that each participant would change the controls to make themselves feel more comfortable. One of the play testers had dyspraxia and it was interesting to see how they played my game and changed the controls to suit their playstyle. The results often talked about the recoil on a few weapons, so I changed the recoil for every weapon to make them feel much more forgiving or add more damage to the weapon in order to make them feel worth it if that they have a high recoil. It also made me spot bugs within my game such as enemies sometimes flying through the air. It happened at least once to each play tester. But, it was very useful for someone to point out that my ray casts from my shotgun were causing the issue. This is where I reduced the weapon knockback from 3000 to a smaller number. There were also changes recommended that were interesting such as reloading the shotgun one by one with the pellets rather than a full clip. It was also stated to have a chance at a re roll on the type of weapon that would be chosen as the game’s main mechanic is the procedurally generated weapons which all have different properties. However I didn’t have time to implement these to my game as I didn’t have a lot of time as the deadline was coming up. I did get negative feedback on the random recoil from weapons. This is where I changed the random recoil when fired but instead made a random set recoil that the player can get used to rather than play a guessing game. As well as play-testing, I packaged my game on the same day. It was very insightful to find out that raycasts do not get drawn in a packaged build. This is where I took it upon myself to add particle effects on the end of the raycasts to show where the bullets would impact for the player.

Things I Am most proud of with my game

• My favourite thing about my game is the random generation of each weapon. This random generation of properties then gets outputted to the specific weapon. This was very interesting for me
• The movement for me is very enjoyable as it takes skill to dodge enemies as well as learning the more intricate mechanics such as jumping and then dashing providing a further distance travelled.
• I am very proud of my shop that I made. It makes use of event dispatchers which I wasn’t very confident in using around the time when I was doing my unreal fundamentals. But, I mainly used them within my UI as well as to call specific functions within the level blueprint
• One of my biggest weaknesses in any project is implementing animations. This happened with my JavaScript game and projects before university. But, it was very helpful to talk to my peers and discover easy to implement resources from websites such as Mixamo and the models resource which helped speed up the process.
• I am quite proud of making an accurate line trace to the centre of the screen. The problem was that I attached the player camera to the player’s mesh head which would cause the camera to tilt which in turn would make an inaccurate line trace. This is where I found out that you can specifically get properties from a structure held within the camera blueprint which represent what the player sees on their screen.
• It’s also good to see that I had all positive results in adding accessibility to my game as this was one of the hardest things in the project to implement. However, I did end up copying a few of the scripts in other UI components throughout the project which showed great progress in efficiency within my coding.

Plans After Deadline

In my own time, it would be nice to implement more of the feedback from my peers into my game as that would make the game even better. As well as that, I am most likely going to learn more on C++ implementation within Unreal as I love coding. But it feels good that the game I envisioned within my GDD got made to most of what I was aiming for. That in my eyes makes me proud.