Tom's game design

Today I also wanted to try and make the wall run animation stop as it gets to the top of a wall because at the moment it continues to play the animation. So to fix this I got the function that I made the other day that detects if there is a ledge there, when it is active it should stop the wall-run however you can see in this video it doesn't work. I continued to try other things to get it to work but they were all futile. Towards the end of my video, I found out that the node "montage stop" waits until the montage has actually ended, this means that I cant actually stop the animation until the end of the montage. To fix this I plan to shorten the montage to one step and to make an interest to count up to a certain number and then stop the montage so that the player cant wall run forever. I didn't finish this today, I will continue after the half term.

As I said i wanted in todays plan, I found out why my character wasn't playing the animation. It took me only a few moments though. My ledge grab animation can only be played if the player begins a jump onto it or is jumping as they do it. this meant the animation wouldn't play state after the wall run. As you can see in the video I made a completely new variable for it but that made another bug for it, so what I did is that after the wall run animation is played I make the boolean "can grab" true and it then lets the player grab the ledge after wall running. You can see at the end there is still a little bump but I might be able to fix that with playing with some numbers.

I have decided to begin to make a list of things that I want to get done on that day. These will mainly consist of a list of task and maybe a few screenshots. This is mainly for my own benefit and will hopefully help me get into the correct mine frame. I got this idea after watching a youtube video by ThinMatrix, Here is the link  (Time Stamp 0:23) My plan for today: To find out what is causing my character why my character isn't playing the ledge grab animation after wall running. To stop the wall run if the character reaches the top of the ledge.  To figure out what is causing my character to teleport to a different location after some wall runs.

Today I wanted to try and make the climbing system run more smooth. So I began to think, what would help to do this, maybe I need to add checks for the other parts as well as the ledge grab. I began to look around my code to see what checks I had and how well they worked. I then proceeded to add them to different parts of the climbing system, as you can see here. I was trying to make a check where it would detect the floor underneath you and if the floor was there it would turn your characters movement mode into walking. As I was trying to do this I made a new bug where I floated on the building. Here is me trying to fix it. As you can see I tried a few things to fix the issue of floating on top of the roof, (Time stamp 0.03) but once I did that I had another issue, the fix stopped me from being able to climb up the ledge (0.40) and if I got rid of the fix I would float again. So to fix this I made a trace channel to detect when I'm on the floor and if I was not on

Today I have dealt with some bugs that I found during the demo day. The bug was that players could grab a wall even if there wasn't a ledge there. Here is a video of me doing it. As you can see I have made a tracer above the players head that check if there is something blocking it and if there is it will not let the player grab the ledge. 

Today my plan was to make a rubbish bin to put in the alleyway of my setting. Here is the time-lapse video: As you can see I didn't get to finish it, and this isn't because I ran out of time or because I got really frustrated. But while I was struggling to make a basic box with a lid I realised that this most definitely isn't my strength, nor is audio development. My strength is in programming and I wasn't going to play into that if I carried on with this journey. So I think I'm going to try and flesh out the climbing system and maybe try and add some sort of combat system.

Today we had a demo day. A demo day is where we all go around and play the games of our peers and I ran a little experiment in it. I ran a survey and asked people who played my game what the theme might be with the game will be. I made a grey box level and see what they said. Here are the results: It looks like people can see what I was going for.

I was having problems with getting the character to climb all of the walls, but that didn't take long to fix, when I tested it, I could climb all of the walls. however, after fixing that I realised that now had a larger problem, something that I didn't have to deal with in my last project. As the character climbs up one wall, it recognises the ledge about the one it needs to climb. Here is an example of it.  To fix this I began to troubleshoot my game. I try a few things first, I had to find the problem that was causing it, so the logical source of the problem would the ledge tracer. So to check if this was the problem I put the ledge tracer to be on in debug mode, persistently. Then I started the game and saw that it was triggering with the blocks above me. So be I began changing variables in the blueprint that relate to the ledge hight tracer and look at where it moves the tracer ( the green and red sphere). Then through trial and error, I finally got it to work. Y

I took the photo I took at work and did this in the video. You can see that I used the clone stamp tool, filters and select colour range.  You can actually see me changing my mind half way through when I started to use the blur tool,(time stamp 0;43) I realised this wouldn't be any good so I began to explore. As I hovered over the tools I realised that they would show tutorials. I saw that the clone stamp tool lets you click on one place and it paints the point yours over your image. At 1:21 you can see that I use the smart sharpen filter, this just made the small stones in the texture look more defined.

Last weekend I was at work and I want to stand on this floor that reminded me of dark marble. So I took a picture of it and I plan to use it as a martial in unreal. Here is the image I took: 

I've finally have gotten it to work. It turns out that I only needed to add one node. This has taken too long as I thought this would take at most, one session, it's taken 3. I'm not going to take anything out of my game yet, but I may have to consider it later.

So today I started out by actually looking at the game itself to see if I can find out the problem and it turns out that its something to do with the animation montages. So I use animations montages for 2 of my 4 custom animations, I won't go into much detail about them for the sake of time but, it isn't playing them for some reason. However, if I don't use them in an action like jumping into a ledge and hanging off it instead of wall running into a ledge, it plays the animations.You can see this in this video:

Last night I had an awesome idea, I wanted to make an automatically generated city to save me a lot of time modelling. So I began to look into it and found this video. I will be attempting to use this plugin for Maya.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4zraXmALlo

Today I've started to integrate my climbing system from my second project into a side-scroller preset in unreal. Even though I thought this would be a simple enough task I was wrong. I started with migrating the third person character blueprint from my last project (that has the climbing system in it) and adapting it to suit the side-scroller preset, e.g taking the Y movement away. This didn't take too long but and I did it within a few minutes. Then I went to test it and the problems began to start. When I compiled the game it came back with errors, this was the end of the section too so I had to do it the next day. Today I managed to get it working for the most part, however, for some reason I cant get it to play the animations. As you can see below In the video below.  As you can also see, there is a problem with the code where it shoots my character across the room.