Second to last week of production

Before you read this devlog, we want to apoligize for uploading late. If you have been following us, we are punctual but development alongside the building process got the best of us. We promise to be more on time in the future.

We are currently in the middle of our second sprint, wich means mainly grappling with fully implementing the game loop, UI, Effects and Sound. Things are going steady, tough things do come up that will need to be fixed during polish.

UI

In terms of UI, all the elements are nearly finished. The start screen has been updated to be more consistent with the previously exisitng UI elements, some parts also needed to be improved on by making the elements on a higher DPP rate and blurrier brushes, to make edges less rigid. We also figured out how to fix the pale button issue from last week. 

UI programming

While the UI came along nicely the implementation took quite the turn. Unreal's widget system allows for quick iteration when fully done in blueprints. However there are some problems in C++. While it is true that you can bind widget making it so the derived blueprint needs to have them, artists were never introduced to such a concept. When the UI was made, the programmer had to double check if variables and types were okay. Some types did not help with the workflow and needed more iteration.

A big problem Unreal has as a whole when coming to navigation is controller support. Hover effects don't exist for these so you manually have to do it yourself. Alongside some linker issues, deprecated systems, and no documentation this was a hell to do. It also does not support ease of use regarding some styling. Some containers have different properties on scaling objects and can flat out ruin the positioning of other widget components.

A mistake that was made is not realizing the potential of the buttons we made. Buttons that were able to be selected by the player, but this was also partially handled in the widget itself. Not a good thing to do as the start screen and end screen have identical code to handle the same issue. More planning can be invested in the future regarding navigation and what is expected.

Currently the UI is controller only and does not support mouse (but it does keyboard), this would be great to add in the future. For now it is important to just get the loop looping.

Sound

The sounds implemented last week were not always fitting together all too well, so a bunch of them got replaced this time around. Huge credits to Worms Battlegrounds, as we used a lot of their sound effects for our gameplay. By now, almost all sounds are in the game, everything is starting to come together and it is looking promising!

RFX

This week several real-time effects were created. These effects will mainly serve as a visual representation of certain actions as well as improve the game's overall aesthetics.  Most of the effects are Sprite Rendering ones, with the exception of wind effects which use Mesh Render instead.

Wind Effects

Propeller Effects

Engine Exhaust Effects

Bazooka taking out and hiding effect

Bazooka Shooting Effect