Pre-Year Reports

Before I started this college year I started to try experimenting in Unreal 4 and followed a series of tutorials and I roughly documented this process so it seems fitting to put those write ups on this blog as they are part of my process for this specialism.

I have been following this RPG tutorial on Unreal to increase my understanding of the software and potentially expand the scope of my level to have more advanced gameplay systems than what the stock gameplay archetype templates provide. This tutorial uses the Blueprint systems to create a third person roleplaying game with health, abilities governed by a mana ability and regenerating of these different resources gradually over time as well as from pickups.

I have made my own adjustments to some of the tutorial to add some polish to the healing system. Previously using just the blueprints form the tutorial would mean that when at full health the player could still cast the spell and waste mana when gaining no health. I added this branch which would check if the players health was equal to or greater than 1 (the maximum value of health) and the rest of the script would not continue if this condition was true. This means that the player cannot cast the spell when on full health.

I also added another branch that checked whether or not the player character was in the falling state, otherwise the character would get stuck in mid air if the player casted the spell whilst in the in the air. This is probably due to the fact that the player character is forced to stop when casting the spell as well as the character not having any sort of in air animation. As it stands my fix is a bit of a band-aid fix but works regardless.

As part of this tutorial series I have created a melee character that attacks with a sword. To test my understanding of what I have learnt during the tutorial regarding animations I have attempted to set an animation where the player kicks in front of him (using a kick animation in the animation bundle I downloaded). Following a tutorial is one thing but trying something again on my own will test my knowledge and hopefully make It easier for me to remember as well as increasing my understanding of what

One issue I have encountered is that when getting a variable from the character event sheet and promoting it to a variable with the Animation Blueprint it will sometimes not allow me to set the variable in the AnimBP as the same name as the main player character variable. Here I could have 2 variables set as “Kick” although the rest of the variables work fine with identical names.