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.