Game development career thread:

Finally solved this one. A friend helped me out, doing it in a slightly different way.



I misunderstood the instructions a bit. It says near the top the elves want all the junction boxes powered, but I guess that is overruled by the bottom paragraph.

Lots of wasted connections in the "correct" answer.

Look at the waste on part 2

Committed to grinding out as much progress as possible over the next month, so redid my human's texture. More or less happy with the result. We'll see how he looks once I get him in engine. I'm still not fully satisfied but quickly approaching my good enough limit.

Made some good progress recently. Have a couple biomes now I'm fairly happy with. Got some building assets that are very WoW and I think will suit me just fine. Got the human model in game, decent chance that I'll retexture him but good enough for now. Made some janky animations as you can see below. Enemies now equip anything in their inventory that can be equipped and wield weapons. They take weapon stats selectively if they are either more damage or faster than their base. They can also proc if the weapon has one. Upgraded to UE 5.7.2 which may or may not have been a good idea lol.

I spent too much time figuring out how to make a GIF locally to not attach it here, but its pretty low quality to fit forum standards. Getting to a point where I might start making some higher quality content just to kind of show stuff off and see if it interests anyone.

I'm still on the fence about floating combat text, but I haven't bothered making a combat log yet so it stays for now.

Been a solid month or so of gains for sure.

Been working on "juice" recently. Sound effects and music especially right now, but soon will be focusing on VFX focused around player skills for each class. Around then I'll also rough in basic animations for each skill and I'm hoping to have a very simple baseline for most of the effects. My general plan is to just get -something- relatively close to what I want into the game and I'll refine things later. As such I'm able to really mow through this stuff quickly since I'm just trying to get something quick and dirty in.

Maybe will end up regretting it, but what I've learned from this process so far is that I'm far more productive if I just move fast and get things checked off the list rather than spend a ton of time agonizing over every detail. Some of it will be bad and need to be redone, but some of it nobody is going to care about except maybe me.

On that note I wanted to share this just in case any one wasn't aware, I only found it today. This company Sonniss sells audio packs and apparently they release a big bundle every year for GDC for free. So this is all royalty free, fully licensed sounds for use in anything. Looks like about 200GB total so pretty excited to nab it and dig through to find stuff I need. I've purchased a fair amount of random stuff via Humble Bundle which has been pretty useful, but this is a massive trove I'm hoping will help fill some gaps I'm having. Since I was excited to find it figured I'd share it here, although I'm sure some of you already know about it.


EDIT: Doesn't feel right not adding a little proof of progress. UI still WIP but added some icons for items and equipment recently:

Just wanted to make a quick note that Cascadeur is truly a magnificent piece of software for creating animations if you're completely inept like I am. I'm in no way saying this animation is good, BUT I did make it in less than 5 minutes by simply creating 2 keyframes and letting the AI-interpolation fill in the rest. This has been huge for just roughing stuff in and getting it moving. I can come back later to this and fix the strangeness (legs clipping, weight painting on butt/legs no good, elbows need to remain wider during sit, etc) but I can't imagine a faster way to get up and moving than this while making your own animations. Also standing up isn't an animation right now, its just blending back to idle pose. Will fix standup later.

Using FFMPEG to create the .gif files and its doing some damage to the color of the video, but you get the point.

Got a bunch of cool systems in place over past week. So as I progress its getting a bit clearer what I'm trying to make and I'm thinking at this point the game will have three basic pillars.

Dungeon Crawling
Base Building
Base Defense


Dungeon crawling and base building are already in to some degree and the last piece I needed was base defense. Got the framework for that in today. So I can trigger a base attack event, spawn waves of enemies and apply a route for them. Part of this was getting friendly NPCs sorted out so they work properly. So now I have guards, quest givers, etc functioning more or less the way you'd expect.

Still need to work on win/loss scenarios and such but one fun feature I really wanted was during these base defense events you get a MMO style group UI element so you can monitor your allies health, heal, buff, target via UI etc... all the stuff you'd expect. What I'm hoping to do eventually is have the base building portion let you select the type of guards you have with you during defenses, let you upgrade them equip them, etc. So this portion of the game lets classes with heals and buffs etc kind of flex those capabilities and this also sets the foundation for companions for dungeon crawling sections if I choose to go that route.


Also recently added significantly improved AI behavior for NPCs. They can now intelligently pick and use spells/abilities assigned to them in combat, buff friendlies in range, etc. Overall super happy with the pace of progress right now and getting dangerously close to this being something actually playable that I'll need to get people's hands on. Still sooo much to do but its moving right along.


Bonus SS of Sergeant Slate and the boys taking out the trash.


EDIT: considering using GitHub - sinbad/SUDS: Steve's Unreal Dialogue System for dialogue system. Open source and well reviewed, curious if anyone has experience with it. If I end up using will probably post here about it once I've decided if I like it or not. Welcome to my blog

Still cruising along on this. Rewrote my targeting system from scratch and feel a lot better about it now. As part of that process I redid the nameplates, targeting rings, etc to make that all feel better and more congruent. One of the issues I ran across was deciding how to represent nameplates in world. My main decision point is basically to use world space (so nameplates live above enemy head) or screen space (as shown below). World space seems like the obvious answer, but there is one main problem with it. UE5 essentially forces you to use TSR unless you're going to be rewriting engine code... which I'm just not going to do at this point. One of the side effects of this is a ton of color smearing and blurriness with text in world space, it looks terrible and really hard to read.

As such I created a scaling a visibility system for the nameplates so they kinda increase is size and opacity with range which mimics world space to a degree. I'm overall pretty happy with the result but there is one major caveat, as you can see below the Moss Snake's nameplate is going to show over my character even if you can't see it. I tend to think this isn't a huge deal, but curious for opinion on whether something like this would bother you? I could have the name disappear if the enemy is obscured by a character, but I don't like that solution in practice.

If nameplates weren't so awful in worldspace I would never do this, but I simply couldn't find a solution that kept things legible during gameplay.




Besides that I've written a footstep system to read terrain type, or it checks a given asset for a surface tag, and plays the appropriate footstep sound which is really nice. So transitions between stone and grass for example can be heard. Also built in the ability to check player for armor type and can adjust the sound for that as well. Chainmail footsteps vs leather, cloth, plate etc. Managed to do it in a way where that actually isn't a huge PITA to do either which I'm fairly proud of. 99% of players probably don't care, but whatever I think its cool.

Put a bunch of time and effort into VFX and SFX for spells too. For now leaning heavily in a classic EQ direction for VFX which I think will be obvious. Basically just using niagara to spawn sprites for the effect. I can and may adjust this later to use a more modern system but this is great for just getting something in ASAP. Also created an aura system which took some work but what I ended up with is super flexible and I'll be able to use it for a ton of different cool abilities.

Early heal vfx. I've actually fixed timing on the impact, better sprites etc, but not willing to re-record so here is the first draft:



Auras in action, mostly just seeing the vfx swap when casting a new one and ability to click off buff to cancel. This one also using my updated spell sprite which is a little more transparent.


Been a really productive couple weeks overall. I think next I'll be focusing on itemization and crafting to give a bit more "stuff to do" when running around and testing. Necro class is coming along well as, I think, one of the first classes that will be "finished" for the demo. I still plan to implement the SUDS system for dialogue, just been putting it off. Have another combat system pass I need to do to get resists working closer to how I want them... as of right now its just % based reduction but I need to implement something for full resists so that stuff like snare doesn't just land 100% of the time. Obviously a ton of visual work to be done, armor, weapons, face/hair variety... women lol. Moving along though