Extremely Overdue Update for Game Development Techniques

Well, what can I say? I didn't keep to my promise of blogging on a more regular basis so here go.

Game Dev Tech Weeks 2-6

Week 2

Well so far we have mainly been concentrating on increasing our skills with Unreal. First of all to give us some more practise using the Unreal Editor we were given the task of creating a map using a location somewhere in the area. This was a group project for the week and meant that we split down the location into smaller manageable areas.

There were four groups, each with at least 4 members and one of the members was also project manager for that group; I was project manager for my group. The 4 project managers sorted out in their groups who was doing what of the area assigned to them. The project managers met to see what the naming convention of the entire project will be and which of the smaller maps from each group will connect up, we decided on the naming convention of the area the group was dealing with and then the smaller areas being dealt with by each member of the group e.g Market_North. The project managers also set a deadline to have the work done ready for the connection to eachother before the actual deadline. I think in a way we all knew we would not stick to the deadline but it did make us get on with the work and we had it ready for the actual deadline.

This shows the section I created:

Week 3

This is where we started to real get down to the nitty gritty of Unreal Script. This is the week where we first started creating our proper game. Using the Total Conversion files that were provided to us we added our own levels and get a character and menu working on screen. This was pretty easy going but gave an insight into the code we will be dealing with for the rest of the semester. One bug that was slightly weird and only happened on the computers at uni was in a certain area the character would just slide along the floor with the no means of input.

Week 4

This week we were introduced to pickups and started looking at the code. Our tasks this week to implement our own pickup into our Total Conversion and when it is picked up to display text on screen saying that it has. The actual pickup was not too difficult to create but the text on screen was difficult but so simple, if you know what I mean. The fact of the matter is to actually get the text on screen all I had to was change where my HUD class was inheriting from and the change a value. The change was so slight you could have been there for weeks otherwise!

Week 5

The task for this week was to implement a tool into the game. In the Famous Five book I am basing my game on, the Five help a local butterfly expert catch butterflies. I came up with the game where you have to collect a butterfly net and help catch some then report to the expert and he shows them around his butterfly farm. Unfortunately I didn't get this completed but I did get the pickup of the butterfly net working without the net you cannot collect the butterflies. At this point as I do not have the resources the net is represented by a fire ball and the butterflies are represented by the adrenaline pickups from UT2004.

This image shows the butterfly net pickup:

This image shows the butterfly pickup:

I promise this time blog posts will be more frequent.