In Summary: I’ve got this Application that I’m working on using the Unreal Engine and I’m hoping to have it released by next Tuesday (not this upcoming one); if you have any suggestions that you’d like to see for the project I’m all ears and would love to have that discussion with you.
My approach to this project was to create something that others could learn from and for that project to be a 24 hour “JAM” of sorts.
I wanted to do a few things:
- Provide an example of a unique way that materials could be used to solve a problem (“How to draw a decagon on the screen using maths?”) -> Failed as I couldn’t fill in triangles. Used HUD + Draw Triangles instead.
- Provide an example of a unique way that save games could be loaded to create a modular system that others can build off of to expand the project -> Incomplete due to spending too much time doing the wrong thing; tl;dr Blueprint Save Objects > Writing a notepad reading system in C++
- Provide a unique tool that has an actual purpose. In this case, a tool that gauged your personality in a way that wasn’t “You’re 70% good at Thinking therefor you’re 30% good at Feeling” or “You’re 70% good at Thinking therefor all that you are boils down into Thinking when it comes to decisions”
- Release this tool for others to see, use, and provide feedback on. In addition, I wanted this release to serve as a beginning for my “here are the sorts of things I enjoy doing” collection. As far too much of what I do isn’t presented publicly.
I’ve got some stuff that I’d like to do with the project in order to expand it a little before releasing it but I’d like to put out a quick screenshot of what I’ve got going at this second:
I ran into 3 problems that prevented this and caused this project to be pushed back to my next day off (as it’s a lot of busywork and most of my energy goes into my main project, keeping up with day to day tasks, and maintaining a social life)
- A lot of busywork that couldn’t be easily automated. Stuff had to be written. Things had to be tested.
- My “Stick-To-It” nature caused me to invest too much time and effort into avenues which clearly needed to be solved via an alternative method rather than the path I’d chosen as the “best”.
- The non-editor build has aesthetically unpleasing bugs which will have to be ironed out before the project can be released. I didn’t attempt to build the project until it came time for testing. That testing hasn’t yet happened outside of my own self-tests which aren’t good enough.
- EASTER EGG!
Okay but seriously: UMG hates me. It had a bunch of “features” that I had to implicitly accept or spend (often far too much) time solving. As my project is an application I relied on UMG fairly heavily and to have it frequently present new problems became troubling as time and energy became scarce. In the future I’ll definitely need to take a closer look at the frameworks that I’m working with and understanding their weaknesses and strengths when planning ahead. Right, I haven’t provided an example. Eh hem: The Scrollbox doesn’t let you affect the scroll speed. And it’s SLOW. I have to have users answer at least 60 questions in order to properly assess their personality. This gives the user plenty of time to recognize that their core interaction (scrolling) is sluggish. Ouch. Currently I’ve not come up with a solution for this but it’s on the to do list for next week.