We passed greenlight and now moved onto full production mode! This sprint I dove into major planning documents and some major gameplay core loop changes. There isn’t much to show visually, but the experience for the player is much improved and our team should be able to plan for newer content faster and more efficiently than before!
The biggest planning document that I had worked on was the Game Design Document, where I completely re-did the structure of the document to touch base on every single detail that the game has. This includes UI, Game play loop, Enemies, Upgrades, Special Abilities, Interactibles. Pretty much anything in our game is mentioned and described in this larger than life document. While it can be intimidating to open and find the correct page for the detail you are specifically looking for, it helps each one of the developers really have the same vision for the project.
In terms of changing the game, I worked on a major improvement to our collision system. Before this change, the characters would get stuck on walls very easily (and each other) causing the levels to be needing to be much larger and the gameplay experience would be static. This is obviously an issue as our gameplay loop calls for a very dynamic experience for the players. I was able to add a FloatingPawnMovement component (a default unreal component) and use the Input Vector node to make the characters not stick at all and flow much smoother with the gameplay.
With this new change I am currently working on changing the enemies to also be technically AI by Unreal’s standards so that they also no longer stick to walls and have the functionality to follow the player if they run away.
The team has been super busy to adding new content to the game to allow for our new levels and mechanics to feel in place with the game flow. Next sprint I will be prototyping many new mechanics and systems for the game and will have a much more visually pleasing blog post.
Ethan Loewald 