In The Beginning…

One of those things I’ve wanted to do forever, but never seem to get around to, is to make my own little game. Something that I would find fun, a easy to pick up time killer that doesn’t require any real investment of time. Simple controls, simple and fun game play. Thinking back to the games I grew up playing and what really checked off those boxes for me, SmashTV came to mind. Just waves of guys to blast away, and avoid being shot. So with that in mind that is what my end goal is going to be! I still don’t have a name for the game, but the basic story line is a space station is over run, and you need to take out the aliens, free the station crew as you find them, and just plain old survive!

The first month of my dev project is a little bit of learning Blueprints, seeing as I only know them at a very basic level. Getting a procedural level generator going so I don’t have to create levels manually, and getting an enemy character in; charging and attacking my player pawn. If I still have the time I’ll also work on getting the player model in as well, but for the sake of my timeline I’ll just be targeting the UE default mannequin for now.

As far as assets are concerned I’ve also got a bunch of royality free sets that I have picked up over the last couply years from Humble Bundle deals, and a bunch of royality free audio courtesy of GDC and Sonnis that they release each year! This will save me a bunch of time on creating assets and let me concentrate more of my time on gameplay. For character and environment assets I’ll be using one my of Synty Low Poly sets the Polygon Sci-Fi Space pack, and cherry picking the bits I need.

So far I’ve managed to get the basic implementation of my procedural level generator setup. Rooms are set based on some basic parameters I pass to it, such and min and max tiles, an amount of tiles to cull to make the room shapes a little more interesting, and the amount of rooms. I have run into the odd problem with rooms being orphaned when the corridors are created, or room tiles that were culled having a corridor tile dropped in place of, and then surrounding the area with doors. I haven’t managed to figure out how to fix that yet, but I have some work arounds I can do, that will make it a little less procedural, but at least things won’t be broken and it isn’t something I need to super worry about right now, just take note of.

I’ve also managed to get the basic spawning system in place as well but I have discovered though that they way I’m spawning I can get some overlap of the enemies and items. I at least know how to fix that once I get through this milestone which I’ve set for September 1st, so it won’t be fixed for this first version of my demo. The spawner does remember where it has spawned and then removes that location so it doesn’t use it again, the problem lies in the fact that the generator blueprint is calling the spawner twice (enemies and drops) so each one remembers the location it uses and not the others, so I’ll pull that function and make it shared so I won’t have overlaps no matter how many instances of the spawner I call.

The next piece of the puzzle I’ll be working on over the next 2 weeks to the finish line, is getting the animations into Unreal, and the blueprints for that setup. If I manage to get that finished early, then I’ll see about adding in some basic particle FX and sound FX in. Those are not part of my milestone goals though, so not an immediate goal. At any rate, that’s where things stand now! Stay tuned, as I’ll be documenting my progress as I move along with this little adventure!