Polished Artifact 4
Endless Runner (polished making some enemies move side to side)
Details
This Endless runner game was created in Unreal Engine 4. It drops you in and it generates the course randomly every time so no two courses are alike. It has 6 different pieces that it chooses from to create the course. We have a coin, enemy, up, down, left and right platforms for it to create a course with. The main artifact that I wanted to work on in the game is the enemy. The enemy originally just spawned in at three certain points. But I wanted it to give a bit more challenge, and wanted to add that sometimes the enemies would spawn in and move side to side to give the player a bit more of a challenge. This specifically shows how I can program code that is already complete to do updates and upgrades to add more functionality.
Here is a Screenshot of the gameplay
Here is a short video that I go through and show the code that was created/changed and show off the game.
Reflection
This artifact had a few hiccups during the polishing process as I had to figure out how to move the enemies as they would be spawned do the platform that would be placed down at random. So I did try to do this movement in the platform blueprint but that did not work as intended. Then I settled on adding the code to the enemy blueprint it self. After that I though I would have to get at which location the enemy spawned, which was a goose chase that lead nowhere. I then figured out that I wouldn't need to find which one as long as I kept them on the platform they were on. So I then made the enemy move a small amount that would still make it more difficult but kept them on the platform.
The biggest challenge that I ran into was trying to keep the enemy on the platform and having them use the timeline correctly as sometime the time line would have them move and then not come back to the start and move again from their new point so they would run away. But after some trial and error I found the sweet spot for keeping those enemies in line and on the platform.
Feedback came from some friends that would say to speed up the enemies as I had them moving decently slow and they would seem to slow compared to how fast the character was running in the level.
This Artifact was improved just as I envisioned it to be, which added a new element tot the enemy so the player would have a obstacle that could move to get in the way.
