Development
This past weekend, I had a soccer tournament in New Jersey. With that came a hotel, and therefore no internet. It wasn’t that the hotel didn’t have internet, but their free version (the one I had) could not support a simple Google search. So, besides the one day where I went down to a “business center” run by the hotel with better Wi-Fi, I was unable to do much. That was until on the first night I decided to do more with Unreal Engine and maybe make a game. It is way harder than I anticipated, and I spent many discouraging hours of my weekend trying to get past bugs and other challenges.
To start, I decided in school the past week that I wanted to model my friends face to put into the game as the main character. On the other hand, I’m still unsure what to make the opposition (maybe just zombies). I did just find this really cool free environment on the marketplace shop, which is set in Egypt, so that is most likely what I will use for the final project.
I first started with the third person template pack, which had the basics for vector movement. I then implemented two forms of attack, a push attack with the mouse and a kick attack with the “1” key. These were a bit more challenging, because they involve more in-depth animation that I am incapable of — so you have to search the web for free punch/kick presets and get lucky. On top of that, you need to implement logic into the attack to register if it hit an opponent, and therefore subtract some damage from their health. Here, I pretty comfortably determined that I wanted to make a wave spawner game.
What is interesting is all the intricacies you don’t notice when playing a game but become apparent when making one. For example, something as simple as not being able to attack after something has died or regulating delays to prevent infinite attacking when a key is held down.
Anyway, I then implemented a simple AI that is conveniently built into Unreal Engine that follows the player over some block radius. I am currently working on a bug where some of the people spawned in don’t move at certain locations (you can see below). After that, I then randomized the spawn points for the enemies and sort of stopped there.
The next steps will probably be the hardest — getting my friend’s face onto a meta human to clean up some parts, and then putting that meta human into the game. Furthermore, the Egypt pack that I loaded is absolutely massive, and I will need to remodel it so the game is not 1 GB big.
Here is a demonstration of what I have so far:
Some other things
I don’t know why I didn’t get it sooner, but this past week I also signed up for the GitHub student developer pack — mainly just for copilot. Also, I have my first school field trip on Tuesday since 5th grade to the Yale art museum. Sort of a weird location for Spanish, but it should be fun. COVID sort of messed up my middle school years of field trips and such, but now I am looking forward to this one coming up and the We the People national competition for April Break (which is surprisingly close).
Also, I took this cool photo of a tree for my photography class using phones. I still can’t tell if the black and white or color one is better (I’m leaning a bit toward the color):
