[WIP] Project Frequency | Open World Survival Horror

[BioXide]

@TechLord;256218

With ammo being scarce, I could definitely see a form of ammo crafting, being relevant and additionally drive the need scavenge for materials to craft cool ammo.

Re-Playability is huge on my list, which is why I tend to design my games with Arcade Style mechanics: Fighters, Shooters, Sports/Racers. Arcade games were designed to be short and replayed often (taking lots of quarters). In many Arcade Games the goal was to beat the top score. Although simple it in implementation, it catered to our nature to compete, beating the score set by other human player, in turn, defeating the player behind the score. In modern games, we have achievements and leader-boards.

In my opinion a game mechanic attaches some form of scoring to the mechanic in the game. Its optional for the scoring to be visible to a player. There is at least one repeatable mechanic that operates as such: Auto-Depleting Health Meter and Food Health Meter recharge. If the Health Meter reaches zero the permadeath to the Character. The primary goal for the Player should be keeping their Character alive, but, there has to be a driver to Live, wither its beating the high score, achieving character advancement or completing the game.

I fully agree with what you said, excellent choice of words my friend.

Well after the last video, most of the core mechanics are in place. I decided to take this week somewhat “off” and clean up the code, squash some bugs and tidy up my project files and blueprints. I managed to fix some annoying bugs I had regarding the animation blueprints. During the video, if I spammed my shoot button extremely fast it would lock the weapon completely, not allowing it to function properly. It was because I’m using a combination of C++ logic and animation blueprints, the ABs do all the work using the C++ code. The problem was that I was setting the shooting as a state on the locomotion, activated by a bool, if I spammed the fire button, it would set the bool to true and not play the animation, thus getting locked completely. That was obviously a bad practice and implementation, so I researched a bit on how to generate an event from my C++ logic and call it when the player presses the Fire input.

I made a delegate macro and set it up inside my fire function on the player, when the player fires, it initiates that event, which then activates the animations on the ABs (Setting some conditions first to prevent errors). Now I can spam the fire button and not break the weapon, I also tweaked the melee a bit, it now cycles between 2 attack animations smoothly. I’ll keep cleaning up the code this week and hopefully start building a demo scene which I’ll be using for the Kickstarter :D. Now some pics!

Cleaning up the ABs a bit and making them more clearer to read

I love how clean and tidy my code looks now :D, that’s the function I was talking about, the .Broadcast() calls the event on the animation blueprints

I built a small prototype scene to test stuff out, had some fun wacking the ghouls, it was great knowing that I just had to drop my AI respawner and my monsters would work without any problems, they randomly roamed around the map without having to set waypoints or do anything besides setting up the navmesh. A massive improvement over the AI I had in Unity, which I had to set up the waypoints manually and manage them, eww.

The animator is working on the AK’s animations right now, so pretty soon we will have this beast in the game, ready to pop some heads with it’s massive power, but be wary, the recoil is insane.

That’s all for today, I’ll have a new update video by the weekend :D!