1. Overview
Because this sprint includes the reading week, I could finish many works. We were focusing on the tasks for vertical slice. I mostly worked on zombie, UI, VFX and dialogue system.
Zombie modeling (8-10hr), making lowpoly (2-3hr), texturing (2hr), Rigging and animation (2hr)
Create Zombie animation blueprint (1hr)
Install Build machine software (Jenkins)
flies VFX for bodies (1hr)
Get zombie dying animation and get pose for body (1hr)
Question mark sprite (Enemy notification) (10m)
Soundwave VFX for bone colliding (2hr)
Applying the bone sound wave (1hr)
Design and draw HUD elements for sprint and hover (2hr)
Design powerup UI + draw pixel art (2hr)
Dialogue system (NPC class, Dialogue UI, some animation features and etc.) (5-6hr)
Fix rat sound locally (help Ryan) (30m)
Rat stun VFX (2hr)
Spider VFX (10m)
Polish Level 1-1 (2hr)
Help Nandish for level design (1hr)
Help Ryan to make the gargoyle sound local with ABP (30m)
2. Modeling
I finished the zombie modeling, texturing and applying animations. It was harder than I expected, because I had to imagine stylized version with the realistic references.
After I finished all the modeling process, I uploaded the model to Mixamo and applied animations. I found a very funny dancing animation for zombie, but we can't use it yet because the usset animation file is too big to upload to GitHub, more than 100MB. Therefore Marcelo have to deal with LFS, maybe next sprint. I hope we can use the animations for Easter Egg.
3. VFX
In this sprint, I made some VFXs using Niagara. First I created a VFX for dead body. I got a fly animation spritesheet and made a VFX.
It was harder than I expected to make flies movement. I also created a VFX for bone collision. To find a better VFX, I had to make some different type of VFXs for 2 hours.
The Niagara effect are working when the bone collides on other collisions. I also worked on applying the VFX to the bone class. I created the actor and made it destroy after several seconds.
I created a VFX for rat stunning. When Marcelo was making rat AI better, he asked me to make a VFX or sprite to show rat stunning. But we didn't know any idea for that, so we discussed together how to make it better.
Ryan and Nandish gave me the idea, so I created based on the references.
When I was making it, I used the "rotate around point" to make the starts rotating. But it has a problem that it only shows the origin point: (0, 0, 0), global position, not spawning point. So I tried to fix it and I set the transform position.
Now it works perfectly, but I found a problem related to the post process and Niagara effect. I will mention it at 'ETC' part.
4. Dialogue System
I created a simple basic dialogue system. Frist I created a NPC class with skull model with C++ script and used interface class. But the animation itself was not good, so I had to make another version of talking animations. After I applied the animation with skeleton mesh, I tried to make it interact with player collision. When player is close to the skull, it shows a UI to ask the player to press F key. After pressing F key, it shows the dialogue with Dialogue UI. I created UI widget and applied it. When the player is far away from the skull or move away, the dialogue UI will disappear. Ryan will make a sound system for this dialogue.
The video above is the skull on level 1, Ryan wrote the phrases. After I saw this text, I found a problem because the text box doesn't contain the large size of phrase. So I applied 'size to content.' Now the text box size are changed every time, but it looks better than before.
5. Etc
I also did some UI design works. I created HUD for sprint stamina and parry and I fixed the UI widget for power ups. I drew all the pixel arts for UI.
The top-right icon is current power up UI that I set it with widget blueprint and bottom-left bars are for sprint and parry.
When I was making a rat stun VFX, I found a problem related to Niagara system and post process effect. We have a post process effect called 'Dark immersive' and it hides the background with dark color. The problem is that it also hides Niagara effect too.
If you see the video above, you can see the problem well. It can be seen if there are some props and objects. But without them, the dark just absorbs all the effects. I tried to find the way to solve, but I couldn't. I asked the mentor, and I'm waiting for his response.
Since I finished all my tasks last Tuesday, I helped other teammates' works too. Ryan asked me to do one of his works. I fixed the rat squeaking sound locally with Blueprint. I didn't know how to do so I had to learn it. I used sound attenuation blueprint and rat blueprint. And then I helped Nandish to make levels. He doesn't know how to set the terrain so I helped him to make it yesterday. In the capstone class of today, Ryan asked me how to set the local sound with animation blueprint, and I helped him to set the Gargoyle local sound.
I forgot saying, I also polished the first level Ryan created. I got some assets from EpicGames Bridge and put them in the level. I fixed the bug of dialogue system and polished the level with props and blueprints. I also fixed the lighting rendering bug. It is at 'Settings - Project settings - Rendering - Shadows' and set 'Shadow Map' to 'Shadow Map Method.'
This is the first level. Ryan and Nandish designed it, Ryan created the basic structure, and I polished. And Marcelo will fix some bugs.
Basically this sprint was quite busy too. But because James extended our vertical slice due, we are making better results.
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