Ahoy for the third week! After two weeks that we hadn’t been very active on the project this one has been exactly the opposite, we worked, and a lot. The project management we installed last week now starts to show its usefulness, planning tasks has proven to be very effective, you’ll see how we have done much more this week:



Highlights

Guilherme and I thought we could slow down a little on the blog posts and work more on the project, but still we managed to create some content for you. Again, if you missed any of the blog posts of this week, I compiled them just for you here:

Ornament Timelapse: Modeling & Sculpting, Guilherme recorded a whole session of his work, which he modeled and sculpted an ornament which will go on the top of fences. Seeing stuff being done from ground up is just awesome.

Quick Programming Tip: Rotate Actor to Face and the Perp Dot Product, A new series has started, which I will give a small question and a answer to it. In this first post on the series, I teach how to rotate progressively an to some orientation while not using Quaternions and SLERP with interactive visualizations and shit!

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In the gay artistic side of things, Guilherme has finished his candle prop set, we intend to use them scattered by the set above some tombstones, on the floor, pillars, etc… this can help a lot to set the mood, and can also give an organic touch to the overall scene, the candle fire will be added later as a particle in UE4, so he just faked it in Photoshop for conceptual reasons, check it out:



Subsurface Scattering: Check

Heat Map: Check

GGX Secondary Reflections: Check!

He’ll be doing a breakdown of these candles on his next W.I.P post that will be online in the next few days! 😉

But it’s not over yet, he’ll also create a bunch of melted wax set to be used in conjunction with the candles, this way we’ll be able stack several candles melted together, things melting on some graves and etc, this will save a lot in the poly count, since the first idea was to model the candles already melting, but at a very high poly cost, if you want to have an idea, this whole candle set has the same amount (if not less) of polys than the single previous one.

We also have a brand new asset to show up this week, you maybe have already seen part of it in his ornament timelapse video, it’s a plate that can be used in the walls as a ornament and also as a cover for some wall-based graves.

Urgh, “modeling”.

The game itself also made a lot of progress, I’m still working directly into gameplay stuff and giving some attention to the level design whenever I can. As promised last week, the terrain is fixed and its material is better, even with textures and normal maps that are far from finished, it already looks pretty good!

Take everything with a grain of salt, this is faaaaar from what we plan it to be, but already a good start (at least it’s way better than the clump of earth and grass we had last week). At least I learnt a lot more about how Unreal Engine 4’s terrain system, even though some tweaks were necessary, the navmesh is working now as you can see on the video, and here:

Some effects were added when you right click the terrain to signal the player where he commanded the character to go:

This makes it look more like an RPG/RTS 😛 It was made using particles, but just used two quads with two crude textures, nothing fancy, not focusing on looks, placeholder stuff!

Another promise that was kept and accomplished: Game timing works right (you can see the clock ticking on the top of the screen of these videos) and mob spawns are also working nicely, they are currently spawning a mob each 10 seconds, but only if there’s no unit inside it spawn area. Similar to most RPGs.

Here’s how the mob spawn area look like in the editor:

And here’s it working in-game:

As implemented during the Quick Programming Tip post, now characters will rotate to face their enemies before attacking, which is a minor but welcome change, and finally Gold and Exp are primitively working already. It works as in most MOBAs right now. The character which deals the fatal blow will get all the gold, and the experience is shared to everyone that is nearby the killed mob. Check it out:

Forgive me for the explosions, that was just too nice to let it out of the video.

Unfortunately plugging animations on the behavior tree was not a good experience, so I’m ditching this for now, I’ll try to check it out later when Guilherme join in the level design, nonetheless, I’m still really excited about the progress we made this week, this reminds me that we should still talk about our next steps!

Next Steps

Here is what I’m planning:

Work a little more on the UI;

Levels and exp tables;

See what I can do about multiple mob spawns on the map.

And here are Guilherme’s:

Melted Wax for Set Dressing

Shoot reference for the Ivy/Vines

Finally finish that damn fence

These are our plans, and thanks god here on Brazil there’s a 2-day holiday this week (all hail Tiradentes!), so work will be done!

And this is it for this weekly, stay tuned for more! (suuuuuuuuuubscribe!)