Funemployment Week 11

This ended up being one of the dryer weeks when it came to presentable visuals. Things are full steam ahead with my part time work, and it's giving me more opportunities to get familiar with Unreal Engine, but I didn't get as far with my self learning in UE as I would have liked.

I started my first assignment in the Pixelles program - a free online course designed to help folks build out a usable games writing portfolio. It's long paced course that will take a number of months to complete, but I'm hoping to stick with it.

The biggest thing of note I worked on this week was the Hooligans prototype. I was provided with the basic metrics that were desired for the level layouts. As I said in last weeks post, level design doesn't really come naturally to me. So having someone else sketch out what was expected was a big help to me, and allowed me to flesh out a much better prototype level. And having the actual desired metrics allowed us to get a better idea of what the sizes for various objects should be. We'll be shrinking enemy sizes, expanding structure sizes, etc. 

The plan is to make further iterations on this test level and see if it actually plays nice. I want to get in a position where myself and the others working on this project can play the game regularly so that we can make calls on how it feels and iterate faster.

via GIPHY

These videos are probably still quite abstract so I'll explain:

This shows what is essentially a "Defence Round" in the Hooligans game. The player has a number of key buildings which they have to monitor and protect from approaching enemies. So far the video shows enemies spawning off screen at set points, navigating to the players structures, and attacking them.

Next on the list is having the player spawning units to defend the structures, having combat interactions between enemy and player units, and improving the camera. It may be noticeable from that one GIF, but the current camera implementation can be a bit nauseating (at least for me). I'll be looking into how to make it smoother and less vomit inducing.

There's numerous other changes that are also planned, but are lower priority for now. This upcoming week I'll be doing an extra day of part time work to assist with a key delivery, so I imagine I won't be getting super loads done in terms of my own stuff. But hey, here's hoping.