Devlog #1: New Beginnings and the Rocky Start

Introduction

Welcome to my first devlog for Liora, a third-person fantasy adventure game. These devlogs will highlight my progress throughout this term on our game and the challenges I face.

Progress Update

The A-Team had their first meeting. We brainstormed ideas for potential games and settled on two ideas that we all agreed on. We then created two elevator pitches for both games where we went into more detail about mechanics and the plot.

We ultimately decided to go with the first idea, an enchanted forest with magical creatures that have been corrupted by evil and need to be saved… with a bow. 

The next step was to set up the Trello board as well as create a GIT repository. Both went rather smoothly. 

With our Trello board set up, we then divided tasks. The primary responsibility I was given was enemy AI. This was because my game last term had quite an emphasis on enemy AI. I had also been assigned the responsibility of modeling a particular character in our game and some elements of the user interface.

Finally, I started modeling the game character on Blender and I also began creating the base enemy AI, the blueprint that would soon become the base of all the enemy AI to come, as well as the corresponding blackboard, behavior tree, and AI controller. I created a nav mesh volume and a simple move-to function within the behavior tree to test if the AI would move. It did.

Challenges

Due to unfortunate circumstances, a creative disagreement, if you will, we separated from the arts & animations group and they are working on their project. It is for this very reason that I downloaded Blender and had to model the character, a sugar glider. Luckily I found a sugar glider asset online, that I could use as a base and make edits to make it look like the fantasy sugar glider I had envisioned. 

Learning how to use Github was also a challenge. I had worked a little bit with Github in the past, but this was some years ago and I certainly never used it with Unreal Engine. Luckily, our Git master, Zack, was quite proficient with Github and was able to teach me how to use it with Unreal. 

Upcoming Goals

• Finish modeling the sugar glider
• Find some free animal assets
• Add an ‘attack’ function for the AI
• Continue working on the AI