CleanYourRoom (Artifact Two)
Description:
This second artifact for the Game Programming Capstone course at SNHU is an Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Pure project in which the player must navigate a room based level and collect "messes" in the environment to clean the room before a timer runs out.
Tools Used:
Unreal Engine 4.25
Blueprints
Highlighted Skills:
Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint Scripting
Credits:
Migfus20 on Freesound.org for the background music track
https://freesound.org/people/Migfus20/sounds/586838/
Reflection:
I would describe the process of creating and refining the project to be incredibly fun. The project was initially created in GAM-303 and was a game prototype that I chose out of three possible choices. The game prototype was inspired by the game Kill It With Fire developed by Casey Donnellan Games LLC and published by tinyBuild. This was the first project I undertook using Unreal Engine 4 that had a great deal of creative control over what was added and how to go about doing it.
As this was the first project I wasn't strictly instructed to create with specific tutorials and guidelines, it was also one of the greatest learning experiences I've had with Unreal Engine 4 so far. There were many errors along the way (mainly in how I tried to connect various systems together to make the functional prototype and how I went about making them in the first place using blueprints), but it made me a better UE4 developer because of it.
I'd say the challenges that came with the project came down to the freedom I was given. I didn't really know what I was doing going into making the prototype, so I had to cobble together multiple videos and diagrams of blueprint ideas in order to get everything in a working state. This led to greater understanding of how blueprints connect together to create gameplay systems.
I did not receive specific feedback of what I could include as refinements after proposing my initial ideas for doing so. As such, I stuck to what I set out to do and refined the project into something more portfolio worthy than it was prior.
As for what these refinements were, there were two minor bugs that were present in the original version of the prototype. The first was a bug in which a bomb in the level would explode and spawn a mess to collect. This mess would be very weirdly spawned in midair where the bomb hovered and was statically stuck there until being collected. I edited the BombObject blueprint to force the mess to spawn directly underneath the bomb where it fractures and hits the ground using the ApexDestruction plugin. The other bug was embarrassingly easy to fix and made me wonder what I was doing in GAM-303 in the first place leaving it in there. In short, there was a bug in the timer found in the HUD that made it so the time left to collect everything would only show one digit for the seconds portion of it. Essentially, it meant that when the seconds would go from 2 digits (i.e :XX) to :0X, it would incorrectly display the seconds as :X without the second digit being 0. All I had to do to fix this was find the ToText node in the HUD widget blueprint and change the "Minimum Integral Digits" parameter from 1 to 2. More importantly than fixing those were the visual changes to the level (making it larger and changing the locations of certain messes) and forcing the player to use new movement abilities (double jump and sprinting) to collect everything in time.
