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Battle Dome

Summary

“Welcome to a world that was alive. Where there was a once great seas and lushes blue skies, now all gone. You are brought back to this world with a dark figure looming over you. This figure shows you what has happened to the world you once have known. Leaving you with one last question to ask. Who am I?”

Overview

This was a project that I worked on for a mount straight. I had to pick up some rigging and animation techniques to bring my robots alive. Below are the high lights of that portion of the project.

Programming Examples

These are some of my examples of code that I have written for this project.

Bullet Select

One major mechanic from this arena shooter is the guns multi-weapon mode select. Inspired by the lawgiver from Judge Dredd. The real challenge was to have the weapon fire different rounds.

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Using a enum of mode, the specific bullet class would be selected and then spawned at the end of the barrel with the forward direction of the gun.

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From there the spawned bullet would control its speed and any velocity updates.

AI Movement

What's the point of have robots that can't move?

I worked on a basic movement logic that has the robots moving about a given area to pre-determined points.

 

It's simple and effective to add so that the robots are patrolling in a given area and following a specific set path.

RobotBaseMovement.gif
AI Target Tracking

While on patrol, the AI is of course looking for targets.

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When one is found the AI would then circle the player while pelting them with led.

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The circling works by taking the players position, adding an offset, and then rotating that position around the player. 

Lessons Learned

This project alone was a baptism by fire. I had a large understanding of what it took to make game and the tricks that developers done to pull off amazing feats on low end hardware.

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Listed here are the critical lessons I learned from this project.
Note: This was when I first started diving deep into development. Some mistakes you have to make in order to understand how and why things are done.

3, 2, 1 Rule

This was the one source of pain of this project.

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At the time, I had to play the broke game. (College life am I right). So I couldn't afford to get a bigger drive I needed to store the meshes for the robots, environments, and weapons. Let alone do some animation.

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I got this cheap flash drive that claimed that it had 600 GB of storage. Fact: it didn't. Causing me to re-do 3 characters animations a few times before I found out what was happening.

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The Rule:
* 3 Backups
* 2 Different Mediums

* 1 off site

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No Git doesn't count as a backup! See Pixar and the making of Toy Story 2, the movie that almost never happened.


Leading into the second lesson learned.

Scope Creep
UpdateToKnewerVersion.png

Born out of desperation due to file corruption. I saw that epic was releasing a new feature.  Retargeting Animation!

This was a new feature that added into Unreal Engine 4.5. Thing was I was in Unreal Engine 4.2. Should be a simple one step to update my project to a latter version of the engine right? Of course not.

I had my AI logic all programmed in C++ and included some of Epics Libraries. Normally this is fine and expected behavior. Between Unreal engine 4.2 and 4.5, Epic made several changes to it's C++ libraries. Causing my C++ code to fail to compile.

Determine to take advantage of this new feature, I took a whole weekend to re-write my whole AI logic in Blueprint. When done, and come to find out, that new feature didn't work and was buggy. This is not really a fault on epics part but on mine.

 

Losing a weekend to this was devastating to project progress. But there was no where to go but to push on from 4.5.

Extra Credit

These are things that I have done that were outside of my skill set as a programmer. Take them more as a test of my flexibility rather than hard skills.

Rigging

In total four models had to be riged. Three models were pulled from turbo squid and the last model was built by hand. This video shows some of the points of articulation.

Animation

Sense each model did not have any animations. I tool each model after I added a skeleton and exported it as an FBX and used Motionbuilder to bake animations to the models.

 

Implementing a set of animations:

  • Waking (all four directions)

  • Running (all four directions)

  • Stationary

  • Death

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

Implantation

Finally it has come to implantation, this required learning the Unreal 4's 2D animation blue-print. This works by taking a point on a graph and using its x and y values to “Interpolate” between different animations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See full play list here!
  • Youtube
Future Plans

The original intention of this project was to show off my skills as a developer and how fair I've grown and can expand. When the Capstone project was done. This project needed to be shelved as I had to focus on paying off them student debts.

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I want to revisit this at a future date. At this time, this project requires more Animation work, level design, and 3D modelling than I have right now as a Programmer.

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Things to do:

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1. Fix arena model to be more modular or adaptable

2. Add in weapon mod pick up

3. Main boss animations needs to be more alive than have a stiff arm cannon

Small list for now but not a simple list.

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