Perilous Paladin

Retro Inspired Pixel 3D Dungeon Crawler.

Download UE4 4.25.4 Project files including source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aaWZT78SZkY9MP0FADflRWlPx0p46Z1N/view?usp=shari...

Doom with a sword

When I first started out in game jam 1, I was very motivated and excited at the opportunity to work with a team to create a game, this would be my second game using unreal engine. I believe I gave useful input into the discussion of what our game would be. As the week went on, I began to take on more of a leadership role within the team and was elected team leader by several members of my team. I believe this is because I had excellent communication and was constantly on hand to help with any programming or design issues, I also had a strong input when discussing game ideas as I was one of only two programmers and was able to decide what would be feasible within the timeframe.

Throughout the first game jam I went above and beyond what was expected of me by my team as I was always on time in the morning and did not stop working until sometimes late at night until I had achieved each goal set for myself each day. The lowest score my team gave me on daily summaries throughout the week was a 7, other than that I was consistently awarded 8’s and 9’s.

My actual contributions include:

Day 1:

On the first day I created the player character and controller. I attached a collision cone to the front of the player that would act as a hit radius for a melee weapon and created the function within the enemy character class that would allow the player to do damage to any enemy within this collision radius. I also created a checkpoint class that would set the players respawn point to its location whenever it is walked over. As we wanted the player to constantly be taking damage within the game, I also implemented a timer function that would do a set amount of damage to the player every second. Finally, I created a health pack pickup that would restore the players health whenever it is walked over.

Day 2:

On the second day I began work on a rudimentary UI so that the players health could be displayed in the form of a health bar and text, I then implemented an enemy character that could be attacked by the player, this enemy would constantly follow the player around which was controlled by a behaviour tree that was developed by another team mate. I made it so that the enemy could be killed and so that the enemy could attack the player whenever they touched. Finally, I began work on a Kunai/throwing knife by attaching a mesh to where the players hand would be, this could later be animated, and began working on the projectile spawning system but was having problems. I later figured out on another day that this was because the kunai was spawning inside the player and was colliding with the player so it would not be visible to the player when it was spawned.

Day 3:

On this day I started out by fixing the problem with the kunai detailed at the end of the last day, so that the player could now right click to throw a kunai that would do damage to enemies on collision with them, I also implemented one of the designers animations and hand models so that the player would actually have an animated hand when throwing these kunai and implemented a timer between shots so that player could not just spam them. I then improved the UI by creating some sprites for the health bar and added a kunai ammo counter, I also created two 3D models for the designers to unwrap and texture a health pack pickup and a kunai ammo pickup. I finished the implementation for the right hand ready to get the designers meshes and animations. I then added another team member’s music loop into the level and finally added a health powerup that would be displayed on the UI and constantly heals the player over a set period.

Day 4:

On day 4 I combined everybody’s project files into one project and helped build the first level. I implemented the right hands mesh and animations and added all the sound cues to the game with implementations for when they are meant to be played. I made it so that enemies would now spawn another team members Niagara particle system when they died and would also heal the player a little. On this day I dried multiple implementations of a boss but was struggling to get the mesh to spawn in the right place as its pivot was off in the model so I decided to make a buffed version of our normal enemy type that would spawn with a bigger mesh, more health, do more damage to the player, and would activate the players health powerup when they die, I added a game over state to the UI when all enemies are dead and made it so that when the player dies the level is restarted.

Day 5: 

 Before our presentation on day 5 I was tasked with making sure that everything was working and put together. Firstly I implemented the new set dressed level which was created by one of the designers and populated it with enemies, I created a 3^rd enemy type, a smaller enemy what would be slightly faster and I made it so that all enemies would have a random chance to drop a powerup when they died, I also created a new pickup which would increase the players damage and made the screen flash red whenever the player gets hit and finally added a main menu screen.