I swapped out the health numbers and ammo numbers for the game. Still frame looks alright now but personally I think the ammo count size needs more work. Also the whole thing is sliding off the screen which makes me think I need to recreate the whole UI widget from scratch. The biggest accomplishment here is getting the hex pattern for that health bar. For my 2d art I primarily use GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) and gimp is usually good about having a pathway to do whatever you need. I would say around 80% of the time you can google “how to blah in GIMP” and you have 20+ years of history to rely on to get some kind of idea on how to do things. For that last 20% the solution is usually involves ripping an image from somewhere else to use as a stencil or as a basis for a built-in filter. In this case it was the latter. Gimp has filters for making a square checkerboard and diamonds but nothing for hex’s except for a “mozaic” filter. Which looks fine on paper but if you’re messing with the alpha you need very exact lines and the mozaic filter makes a pattern that includes a simulated light which annoyingly blurs the edges. However, the edges aren’t blurred by a gradient color (which can be easily fixed) but is blurred by adding a gradient to the alpha.

I tried everything to get rid of these edges but failed miserably: edge detection, thresholding, median blurs, contrast and color selection all seemed to maintain the gradient off the edge lines. I eventually gave up and used the suggestion from “chaz_prinz” here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/rg5wt4/creating_a_borderless_hexagon_gridpattern/ and ripped a hex pattern from the internet to generate a black/white image which I was able to use for the pattern.
I ended up with a pretty nice pattern here:

Which I threw into a filled green rectangle to get the health bar above (plus some trimming/filling around the edges). I think the result is quite nice and fits the whole old-er school vibe that I’m going for. I might make it red just to fit the obvious ascetics from every other game in existence but I figure I’d fix up the ammo up first.

Messing with particle effects today. Above is the result of setting muzzle flash brightness WAAAY to high.

Once I played around with settings I got a good feel for things:

In addition I worked bullet holes so they look a little less “clean”. I still want to get some random going on there but honestly they’re good enough, especially when zoomed out really far.

I’ve also done some work on the physics body of the patrol bot. Now when they die they don’t fly into a million pieces. This stages some of the work needed to make proper impact hit points, however I’ll probably need to scale back the number of collision boxes used on the mesh.

Still using the fake name “BlackLace” I sprinted over the weekend and made a first build of the game.

Features:

• Survival game mode
• Two weapons!
• Some horribly mixed audio
• A settings button that doesn’t work!
• NO WAY TO QUIT AFTER CLICKING START FORCING THE USER TO ALT+F4!!!

Yeah it’s very early but I got paranoid after seeing my GPU memory jump up to 14.9 gb so I wanted to try to send builds to people with less powerful graphics cards (I got a 4090 with 24gb of vram which is overkill for the mat textures I’m using everywhere so I’m not sure where the 14.9 came from…) UPDATE: It wasnt taking 14.9gb it was only taking 3gb

In addition I added in a bunch of quality of life UI elements in spaghetti blueprints that I will definitely forget next week

One of the most aggravating things about unreal is the half way gameplay framework. The GameMode is a weird half way point between arbiter and useless interface that you need to re-implement. Putting things in the game mode is the “Right” way to do things that are dictating the flow of the game but is isn’t needed. For example, in this case I have the game mode handling spawning of patrol bots and the transition from spectator to player in the game. However, something the gamemode failed to do is to 1.) Have a running list of all pawns (you need to make that yourself) 2.) Transition the player back to spectator upon being killed. I have the player pawn spawning and calling the “possess” function on the baseline controller which is crazy silly (I can probably fix that with ordering but still…).

Here’s some gameplay from the exported build.

(I wont use the snipping tool to record videos anymore…)

Big annoyances:

1.) When you shoot a wall it looks like snow (Need to spend more time making some 2d assets)
2.) Enemies collide with corpses (Not sure how that’s happening…)
3.) Reloading/weapon switching isn’t great (I really dont want to make reload animations but I think I need to now)
4.) The pistol I guess i have doing no damage? (Variable value change.)
5.) Enemies get stale fast. (I have a plan for this)
6.) I don’t turn off footsteps after the player dies so they keep going (Have an idea of whats happening here)
7.) The guns poke through the wall (I’ll probably make the gun model turn up or just make holder animations)
8.) Hud looks terrible

Minor nit picks:
1.) The AR Muzzle flash doesn’t stick to the gun always (Seems to be a niagra mesh renderer problem?)
2.) Some of the sounds are bad (I can spend more time here)
3.) Some of the grouping of Enemies (I think that will be fixed with the corpse collision part)
4.) No crouching (Just need to setup a input action)
5.) No hit reactions from the bots (i think I can fix this with a proper physics asset made)
6.) No fired shells

Things that will test my patience:
1.) I need to make a computer settings menu…
2.) I need to compensate for different resolutions
3.) I need to make a proper physics asset for the patrol bot

Oh also I made some junk to fill in the levels with:

Last one I had from an older project but I put new materials on it.

I got a bunch of the animations for the enemy (now I’m calling a “patrol bot”) together to handle it’s movement.Then while I was on a role I threw in some basic AI. Essentially what the robot does is:

• Looks for player (not implemented)
• Runs towards the player
• Starts shooting
• Moves around to random points in a circle around the player (Within 20 deg of where it currently is, assuming the player is the center of this movement circle) That white ball is a quick representation of where the robot chose to move next.

Nothing to crazy here, the bigger issue (like most of unreal) is knowing what won’t back you into a corner and force you to undo everything you’ve made. Here I have two custom tasks and one custom decorator. The “PatrolBotShoot” task was originally executing a fire function but I flipped the bot to a simple “if Has target then shoot every 1 seconds” mechanism to allow for firing at any moment. The “PatrolBotStrafe” Selects a random point around the player and keeps the patrol bot focused on the player as it moves around. The “PatrolBotKeepFacingTarget” decorator does exactly what it sounds like.

The animations are still the hardest part of all of game dev in my opinion:

The sequence below took five individually made animations (The strafing still looks too timid to me) and pushed the limits of my patience when dealing with imports to unreal (unreal seems to have weird issues if you import ONLY the animations from a .glx file).

In other news I also started reworking the muzzle flash for weapons but I’m still working the kinks out.

My goal here (if I didn’t say it before) is to swap in the rifle on the back of the robot for different weapons, then I dont have to do any more work on animations and I can just focus on environment art (which I’m sorely lacking experience for) and gameplay.