UCLan Portfolio Blog

  Now that the player will successfully travel from point to point within the level and will no longer skip any steps before reaching the end, I now need to rotate the player camera since presently if I make the "Simple Move to Location" node move the players location left or right the player camera does not turn to match this and the player just watches as their character is forcefully pushed to the side while they start at a wall. This isn't good sine if the enemy character was to attack the player during this movement the player would not see the attack animation or have chance to respond and shoot at the enemy character as they don't have any control over the player characters movement or orientation, instead I the developer has that control.  As with making the player character move from Target Point #2 to Target Point #3 I could just use the "Set Actor Rotation" node to snap the player viewpoint from what it was to the new direction where I wish their ...

Following on from the YouTube Tutorial I found I can move the Player Character around by simply creating a bunch of "Stopping" points where I want the player to be inside the level then after a delay move the Player's controlled actor to the world location of the next point they need to be at. This is where the actor class "Target Point" inside Unreal Engine comes in. This actor class can be placed in the level but upon running the game they will be hidden from the player's view meaning the player will not have to see a large amount of marked locations and instead can focus on the enemies or environment of the level while the engine can still find the world location data of those Target Point actors then set the player characters location to the new data of the target point. Upon first testing this out by using the "Set Actor Location" node the result has the player camera suddenly jumping between locations creating a very jarring view for the user...

I have never tackled developing a rail shooter before however from playing them myself I know that the player interacting with the game has very little agency on the events taking place on screen and the speed at which the game moves through those events. This is part of what interests me when tackling this project as there will be less opportunity for the player to screw up camera angles or scripted events however the caveat of this is that I will be responsible for every moment of gameplay the player sees. My preferred method of planning is to create a new Trello board for this project then start adding features I intend to include as "Cards" and use both "Labels" to mark them as more difficult (red) or less difficult (green) to implement, and, multiple "Lists" to further organise the board into categories such as "Priority"/"Additional"/"Done" features. Doing some quick googling I found a tutorial series on YouTube showing ...