Oh my god, you were right… I removed the constraints and now the ball moves, although something is not adding up… If I’m constraining the movement on the Y plane and setting the velocity vector for the direction to 1 on the X like you did why does the ball stay still? shouldn’t it move towards the positive X axis? On top of this if I leave everything as is and disable the constraints the Ball does move but it goes along the Y axis… 
Hi and thanks for this tutorials, but on my side, I can’t get the ball bounce again walls.
I redo it severals time, check the Ball collision was the same on tutorial (even if text show World Dynamic and the capture Wolrld Stactic), created some boxes set on blockall, all the time, the ball get trough everything…
I created some boxe collision with overalpping and printed texts, to be sure they were on the same plan. If you have any ideas…
2 Likes
I hate to say it, but this course is pretty much unusable. I’ve gone the first two parts twice (from scratch each time), and still can’t get the mouse to move the paddle. In fact, I can’t see the paddle-- while i can see the paddle in the camera preview, when i run the game, i just see a screen full of light brown. And the screenshots from the game clearly don’t have the mountains and sky, etc.— yet when the screenshot showing the first time we get the paddle moving, there’s purplish-black background. Nothing in the tutorials shows how to get that result.
I also doesn’t even mention why the mesh and collider are being edited in the ‘Left’ view (versus Front view which would make more sense), and exactly in which direction (if it matters?) to rotate the mesh/collider…in order to get it to appear and move correctly later when the movement is added to it…
2 Likes
@thunder_shadow
I had the same issue. Find the solution and it works just fine for me. The ball is bouncing now
Other than that I would say that I am looking fairly optimistic about this course. I don’t mind to face with some issues and trying to find answers. It’s also part of the learning process. But the information that I’m getting here is useful and for now, I`m pretty happy with it.
1 Like
I’m sorry to hear that it has been frustrating, but I will take the feedback and revisit those sections and see if I can expand and better explain things.
Worth noting that with the ball, you don’t need a default scene root - you can use the COL_Ball collision as the root for the actor. I’ll revisit that section to make sure it’s clear. Thanks for helping out!
Thanks! It’s bouncing now !
So I was finally able to get things working for the most part (getting the paddle to move along the spline based on mouse X position)— but how the heck do you see what’s going on in the viewport? Is there a way to set the viewport to the camera view (since it’s pointing right at the paddle)? I have start the preview multiple times using trial and error to finally see the paddle show up in the viewport…
Thanks!
Bryan
So now I’ve managed to get to the point where I’m spawning a ball, but…TWO balls are spawning! Not sure why…
Hi there. Also a beginner and like many in this thread I’m also stuck trying to get the Bat to move along the spline, at the end of the Getting Things Moving section. Upon hitting Play, the Bat appears at the left of the spline, but doesn’t move. Its just supposed to do this automatically, right?
From here, all I can do is speculate.
The only thing of note is that while Playing, if I go to the Event Graph it says above Your Timeline “Paused @ 1.00 s (100.0%)”.
Checking my construction orientation, I’ve got the Camera set to the coordinates in the picture. Static Mesh is at Location: 100, 0, 0. Rotation 0, 90, 0. Capsule Collision is somewhat below, like the photos. Camera is behind me on the global Y axis. BatAnchor is at 0.0.
DefaultSceneRoot, with BatAnchor (StaticMesh, CapsuleCollision, Arrow_BatSpawnPoint), Spline, and Camera under it.
I can’t tell, am I supposed to have any World Settings up and running yet? Also, in the video I noticed a “Col_Bat” in the Details pane that I haven’t been told to make (unless that’s just an alternately named “CapsuleCollision”). Also in the Pawn section, “Auto Possess Player” is Disabled for me, but set to Player 0 in the video.
The section about adding a Key (which I have set to Time: 0.116937, and Value: 0.116417) was rather glossed over and I don’t really know what I was supposed to do here other than just follow the picture provided. If I’ve done something wrong here, I wouldn’t know.
Since this tutorial isn’t very step-by-step, its incredibly difficult to follow along, and even harder to troubleshoot. But the project looked really fun and I was really excited to do some beginner content. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
1 Like
I’m an experienced back-end developer and was trying to use this to acquaint myself with the concepts of game development. As a newbie to these coding idioms, it’s impossible to distinguish between implementation details and important dev mechanics, so a conceptually simple setup like this is much more illustrative than some of the flashier tutorials.
That said, I’ve found this to be pretty frustrating. Unexpected naming, inconsistencies between what happens on screen and what’s shown in the clips, parsing and re-parsing text that errs a little too close to conversational and leaves important points in the middle-end of sentences in the middle-end of paragraphs in the middle of sections. Personally, If I was looking to do that much parsing work I’d just read the docs.
I’ve written a lot of documentation, and even beginner tutorials-- I get how hard it is to really replicate a new users setup, mindset, and lack of ability to intuitively get what’s important, and what’s not. But you can do some real damage to your user base by leading people down a promising path straight into disappointment and frustration.
3 Likes
I have to reiterate the points made by others. This tutorial is not beginner-friendly.
- No assets provided; some vague handwaving saying “oh just procedurally generate the assets”, in a tutorial that explains how to create a dynamic mesh and convert it to a static mesh, without an explanation of what they are or why you’d want to do that. Then the tutorial then doesn’t use those generated assets! Just built-in shapes.
- Videos show stuff not included in the tutorial, e.g. particle effects. I see that’s mentioned right at the end in “What’s Next?”. When following a tutorial, a beginner is going to double check that their work matches the “expected output”. When the stuff I create doesn’t look like the demo video, I wonder what I did wrong.
- I had a lot of stress trying to set up some lighting in the environment light mixer, trying to figure out what combination of lights, strength, direction etc would make my objects visible. It’s fine to say “have fun playing with it”, but please provide a simple base illumination for us to tweak!
- Text, screenshots, and blueprint graphs do not match each other
- E.g. Text says “StoredLives”. Screenshot says “storedLives”. Blueprint graph says “Stored Lives”
- Poor choice of “BI” as a prefix, I thought the capital i was a lowercase l. I avoided the issue by copy/pasting names, but this is affected by the previously mentioned mismatch, and without physically typing them I loose something in learning. I also don’t know what “BI” stands for!
- Some names are too close to generic/built-in class names, makes it hard to find the right Blueprint node. The problem is made worse by not knowing what name to use (due to the text name vs screenshot name vs blueprint graph name issue), so you spend time trying to work out what something is supposed to be called.
- Too much choice left to the developer. As a beginner, I don’t know what’s possible or how to achieve it. Give me a base to tweak and I’ll be fine. (Even just stuff like “put this in an appropriate folder” - what is the appropriate folder? I ended up with assets mixed between two folders because I didn’t know if “player state” was part of the “brick game” or if it lives beyond the game mode, etc.)
- “Script this in your Player State and attach it to the end of your Begin Player event scripting.”
- There’s no existing “Begin Player” event scripting… are we meant to create the event handler?
- “Get Game Instance” doesn’t slot into “Bl Retrieve Stored Data”'s target, needs to be cast to “Bl_Framework” or “GameInstance_”.
- Or, is the node meant to be the “message” version? There’s no indication in the blueprint graph.
- In the “Persistence…” step, you need to add an event handler for a BI_Framework function, but the game instance(? I think, I forget) doesn’t implement the interface (or I missed that step).
- Another naming one, the player state’s “Player Score” in Graph, text must have said “Current Score”.
- “From Begin Play, we’re going to get a simple count of our Child Actors and send that to our Player State via BI_BrickCountUpdate.”. Graph has node “Get Game Mode”, not the state.
As a beginner, I struggled to interpret what was said into what was meant.
I have decided to stop before “Expanding The Game”, as I was dreading trying to follow the tutorial.
I’ve come away from the tutorial feeling that Blueprint development is convoluted and messy, and I should use C++ instead!
I do appreciate your efforts though. Despite all the anxiety this tutorial gave me, I can see how Blueprints could potentially be a neat way of wiring up game logic without worrying about silly programming mistakes.
5 Likes
I agree with you. It’s so hard to follow this tutorial, I feel is so informal and not well explained for beginner-friendly.
- It should always include the assets and final project for a beginner-friendly tutorial.
2 Likes
You need 2 points on the timeline, not just the one the tutorial tells you to make.
I set mine to time 0 value 0 and time 1 value 1.
2 Likes
As a beginner new to Unreal I must also echo many of the comments here regarding the difficulty and lack of detail.
I really don’t mean to criticize what would be some great learning material but I find following this really frustrating, and this is something no one needs to experience when learning something new for the first time.
I note that not all the interactions are captured to get to the screenshots mentioned in the course and while it might be second nature to someone experienced with the Unreal Editor, for someone totally new, this is definitely something that will put people off. I get the feeling there is a lot of stuff that has been abstracted away and only the high level details have been captured.
I am not entirely sure if you are able to, but video tutorials I think are much better for new starters as people can see your screen and know exactly what to expect, where to click and perhaps make more inferences if there a small detail changes between editors.
Perhaps I will come back to this later on if you can find the time to fix up the course content.
Thanks
Hello, I have finished the course, very challenging one and now im trying to adapt it to a mobile version, but I’m having problems with the bat movement on touch input component. Is there any help or guides that you can give?
Excactly i can not reproduce the value of Axis Value for Bat Movement on the Spline! The movement that I manage to reproduce is slow and laggi!(pic with the BP code below)
It’s likely there’s a second ball spawning from the bat reset. If I had to guess why, maybe under the hood resetting the bat (starting a new time) is possessing the bat a second time?
i want to love this tutorial i really do but for a complete novice its difficult to figure out and when something does not work i cant comprehend or figure out why
i am definitely going to keep an eye on it and come back to it later with some more experience
This part of tutorial is awfull… Looks like some one just got idea in his head and another person got another one idea. And they wrote this tutorial separately from each other.
And all this tutorial looks like its wrote by Jekyll & Hyde
mb it’s good idea to make a video part of this tutorial.
And its realy not for novice. Anyway thanks for explain some sort of game mechanics.
I manage to fix it, now the movement of the bat is smotly!
For this I would like to thanks mister Samvangelist
Below is the blueprint, u can controll the speed of the bat on mobile by changing the value of variable “Touch Move Speed”
All logic is in PlayerController_Bat
**
**
