May Day

Today's post is a bit late, but I have good reason. I spent the weekend with my dad for his 61st birthday. We went to a Phillies win in Cincinnati during a day game and had a great time. Sunday we went to a local Italian restaurant and enjoyed great food and conversation with my Dad and my wife.

Today is May Day, which is a cool day if you look into it.

I made a bunch of progress Saturday and Sunday but was too tired to post at the end of the weekend. Pair that with a fast start to the week and it's Wednesday after my workout before I'm posting progress! I like that the blog posts are keeping me disciplined and motivated and I find that I get anxious when I haven't posted. Like an astronaut calling back to Houston and checking in. Routine and boring but shows progress towards the mission.

A human enchanter

Here's this week's push towards something playable and fun!

• Added gameplay tags for inputs F1-F12

• Added gameplay tags for inputs 0-9

• Setup montage gameplay tags for melee attacks

• Added an array of attack animations to the base character class so player and enemy blueprints can cycle between them randomly during combat

• Added more sockets to the skeleton for right hand, left hand, and the primary and secondary weapons

• Added unarmed melee combat mechanics

• Created a new monk enemy type

• Added animation notifications to all unarmed and sword combat animation montages to rotate towards target and trigger gameplay attack tags at the appropriate frame in the animation for a given attack type

• Fine tuned melee combat mechanics coefficients and damage calculations

• Fixed a bug where enemies could attack each other when attempting to attack the player

• Fixed decay time for corpses and corrected a bug in the dissolve material instance

• World geometry and static meshes can now generate overlap events and trigger collision impacts on projectiles

• Setup ranged attacks using projectiles

• Setup ranged damage curves on the damage curve table

• Setup ranged attack animation montages and motion warping when attempting to attack

• Fixed a bug where in certain cases looping sounds attached to projectiles would never be destroyed

• Corrected timing of sound cues and anim notifies in the bow & arrow attack sequence so it feels more natural and snappy

• Monks can now perform unarmed combat with both hands

• Rangers can now fire arrow projectiles from their bows

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/5ee396_bf259902b87a46eb95eb157e9b198a0c/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Enemies causing damage within a sphere

Example of a corpse decay shader

The enemies have simple but promising foundations for their AI logic. It took a bit more work than I expected but now I understand how the system works and have complete control over how things work. I am more confident building my classes and blueprints and don't worry so much about the future additions like I did when I started in December. Momentum builds, and just like grinding levels, I'm grinding these features one at a time.

Feeling positive vibes and excited for this week's progress. Back to the grind.

Cheers,

Vinny