Funemployment Week 10

I'm only 1 day late with this post so in theory I'm getting better at this.

In a way this past week was overall good for my productivity, even though what I actually did was relatively little. I say it's good because I came to two good realisations.

1 - I am not a keen level designer.

For the robot/shooter prototype I'm working on, I was trying to figure out what was making me stall with progress. I was thinking up systems and enemies and narrative beats all relatively easily. And then I discovered that when it came to putting levels together, that's when I started pausing. The actual nitty gritty of carving out a space, figuring out a route, knowing best where each enemy and pick up should go.

So I tried to steamroll past this issue and just start making levels and putting things in them. I'm going to treat it like writing, where you do a first draft and then once that's complete, you forget about it for a few days before going back to it and pruning all the crap that didn't work.

2 - I need specific goals to aim for when learning something

I've whinged on here for a while now that although UE Blueprints are undoubtfully something very useful to learn, I haven't been motivated to continue learning it. I thought it was just because I wasn't enjoying the actual process of learning and trying to make stuff in it. In actuality, I think it's because - similarly to the level design issue - I didn't know what direction to go in.

When you've got a tool that you can go an infinite number of directions with, it can be overwhelming to even know where to start. To combat this, I decided to learn a very specific thing or things one at a time. I decided to go with learning how to make a basic first person shooter first. So I found a tutorial and followed the steps and made the following:

Learnt about mouse aiming but gun mesh and player don't yet turn.

Now with 100% less crotch shots. #UE4 pic.twitter.com/hUTZDloGwu

— Danny Colclough (@DannyColclough) January 16, 2021

It's basic and ugly and the camera doesn't turn with the mouse yet, but it was cool learning the most basic of basics to get this working.

Coincidentally, it's these kinds of limits which I think end up producing the best creativity. The issue with the player only able to really move forward with limited aiming made me wonder if there'd be a game in that. A literal corridor shooter where your movement is limited and you have to take on enemies in an extremely tight space.

Anyways, those were my two realisations this week and what I got up to. 

Other miscellaneous things done in the past week:
 - Carried on with my production work
 - Enrolled in the Pixelles writing portfolio program
 - Wrote up and recorded my thoughts on Dishonored (2012) and was going to put out a video but Adobe Rush decided to be a drama about it
 - Added lightning hazards to the shooter prototype
 - Added most of the enemy spawning logic for the Hooligans​ prototype