I’ve been busy for a good percentage of the past month, so it was exciting to finally get a chance to sit down today and continue prototyping the game that I started working on a little while ago.
Latest additions include:
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– changing from landscape to portrait. I haven’t figured out how to get the orthographic camera to work… it seems to not be oriented correctly… so I left it with perspective, but I’ve pulled the camera back to reduce the perspective a little bit.
– wasn’t comfortable with the disconnect between moving your finger one way and the character moving the opposite, so I ended up reversing the direction…. it feels more natural to me now.
– refactored the blueprints a little bit for optimization and readability. I *think* it’s doing things efficiently now. Tick now only runs when the finger is on the screen instead of constantly. I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to do swipes without tick.
– moved the sound component from the character to the weapon, and created some child blueprints for the weapon. This way sound spawns automatically when the actor is spawned. The UE example that I had started from had it being spawned manually, which doesn’t play nice once you have multiple weapons.
– created a function dedicated to determining what the player has touched on screen (player or edge of screen or neither)
– added a check, so that if you swipe on the 10% of the screen closest to either the right, or left side of the screen, you can swap weapons.
– weapons are stored in an array, so I can insert as many different weapons into the array, and it will automatically allow me to loop through them no matter how many are in the array.
– the ship now faces the direction it’s firing
It’s super satisfying to be at a stage where I’m figuring this stuff out without following tutorials. I’m able to mostly figure it out on my own, and then figure out the rest with some quick google searches. I’m definitely more comfortable with this software than I was a year ago. Even though I do primarily VFX at work, I’m still learning more every damned day. I’m definitely going slower on this side project than I’d like, but between work and my new schedule now that Andrea’s back to work and we’ve got a little rug-rat to look after, it’s going to be rare than I get time to make progress.
At any rate, I’ve got enough done on the controls at this point that I should be able to get into trying my hand at some enemies. First step… getting them to exist…