Hi Everybody,
Bruce “Demolition Man” and I am uploading what I could get finished in four days for the August 2015 game jam. The name of the title is “Battle Boats” and the link is provide below. There may be a bug in the flag capture routine as it seems to work fine in the editor but for some reason appears not to work correctly when the game is compiled. Oh Well. Game is uploading to the Google this evening and should be available shortly. In the mean time, there is a short demo video on the that shows some of the features in the game.
https://.google.com//folders/0B7_FRT-laK3KVHZjOVFQUmVLQ2M
GameJam - 08/2015
GameJamTheme - Thrown in at the Deep End
GameTitle - Battle Boats!
Target Platform - Windows 64 bit PC
Compiled With - Unreal Engine 4.8.3
Studio - LoneWolf Studio
Team Members - Bruce “Demolition Man” (It’s just me and I am available for hire! Please email me!)
Contact Email - Bpo83703@yahoo.com.
GameLink: https://.google.com//folders/0B7_FRT-laK3KVHZjOVFQUmVLQ2M
Day 1 Notes Thursday 08/13/2015 (1pm MST to 11:30 pm MST) ( Total Hours - 10:30)
01.) Created Battle Boat Pawn Class
02.) Created Player Controller Class
03.) Created HUD UI Widget
04.) Created Health and Ammo Pickup Classes
05.) Installed Credits UI from another evil project.
06.) Installed Menu UI from Marketplace
07.) Installed Explosion Pack from Marketplace
08.) Installed Cloth Animations Pack from Marketplace
09.) Developed Map1. Used landscape height map from Terresculptor Pro
10.) Installed Water Pack from UE4 Sample library
11.) Created Projectile base class and boat missile class
12.) Installed a modified version of my old battle boat test vehicle from UDK days
13.) Created simple waving flag class
14.) Ran a test compile at the end of the session
15.) Created a simple Rules and Keystroke UI screen so people can switch to it from within the game
16.) Developed Countdown timer and modified HUD to display the counter on screen.
Day 2 Notes Friday 08/14/2015 ( 8am to 11:45 am)( 12:30pm - 02:00pm) (04:00pm - 05:30) (06:00pm to 09:00pm)(Total Hours - 09:45)
01.) Rules screen was changed to also display Keyboard definitions
02.) Created Water Mine Blueprint class. Modified Pawn to be able to deploy mines. Costs 2 round of Ammo to deploy a mine
03.) Adjusted HUD to display Kill, Death and Ammo counts for both teams.
04.) Created MatchOver UI. Should display winning team and team scoring counts.
05.) Assigned physical materials to primary material in use by the game
06.) Added BattleBoat camera viewpoint changes to support chase camera, cockpit camera and bow camera
07.) Added Laser Sight to Battle Boat. Can be toggled on/off with the L key
08.) Added the Boat Horn. Oh Yea!
09.) Added Music from Vehicle Race Game for the radio cue
10.) Ran a test compile at the end of the session
Day 3 Notes Saturday 08/15/2015 ( 08:15am to 03:30 pm)( 04:00pm - 07:30pm) (xx:xxpm - xx:xxpm) (xx:xxpm to xx:xxpm)(Total Hours - 07:15)
01.) Watched Advanced AI Toturial on Epic Games YouTube channel, Support Twitch Broadcast: AI
02.) Setup Basic AI Support with Behavior Tree
03.) Broke Flags into Seperate Blueprint (i.e. Red Flag, Yellow Flag). Not sure if this was the best idea.
04.) Awful Day. Not much got done today that works…
Day 4 Notes Sunday 08/16/2015 ( 06:00am to 12:00 am)( 12:30pm - 04:00pm) (xx:xxpm - xx:xxpm) (xx:xxpm to xx:xxpm)(Total Hours - xx:xx)(Crashes - 3)
01.) Worked on BotAI. Tried to get working Health and Ammo support operational.
02.) Determined that navmesh is on the waterplane and not blocked by the terrian as you would think. Terrian needs rocks around the edges to block boats from going on the land.
03.) Added some trees in the text level to see how well the thing performs.
04.) Tweaking on AIBOt respawn code as this wasn’t working 100% percent.
05.) Test compile and last round of tweaks (04:00pm MST)
06.)
07.)
08.)
09.)
10.)
WishList
1.) Boat Wake Effects
2.) Proper Boat Sound Effects
3.) Soundtrack (As usual I can’t afford Jesper Kyd!)
4.) Multiplayer support. This would be cool with 5 vs 5 or 8 vs 8 teamplay!
5.) Better death sequences. Would love to have the boat break up into pieces and have the driver ejected from the boat into the water.
What did it take to build this game?
1.) Lots of tunes from Duran Duran, Areosmith, BOC and Parsons
2.) 1 Little Ceasers Pizza (i.e. I got carried away Thursday night and almost skipped dinner)
3.) Lots of Diet Pepsi. At least 4-2 liter bottles…
4.) One Microsoft Hardisk check (40 minutes lost time)
5.) Upload time to Google
Assets From Prior Projects
1.) Epic game landscape exmaple project. Rocks, trees, materials and other misc items.
2.) Pickup Meshes - Health, Rocket Ammo
3.) Weapon Meshes - Rocketlauncher
4.) Character Mesh - Fuse Soilder
5.) Assets from Marketplace purchased specifically for this project - Explosions Pack (i.e. for rocket projectile impact explosions)
6.) Began project with Quality Menu Options from Henrik. It’s odd that he installed the menu support into the PAWN Class and not the Player Controller class.
7.) Lasersight from last months GameJam entry.
What was built from scratch
1.) UI - 4 screens in total (i.e. HUD, Rules, Credits and Match Over screen)
2.) Boat Pawn blueprint. Bot regular and AI controlled versions
3.) New Character Blueprint
4.) Landscape Test Level
5.) A few Materials
7.) Height map created with Terresculptor Pro