Overall Progress
My Bali visa expired this week, so I moved to Hanoi (Vietnam). Lucky me, they had independence day this week, so most coworking spaces were closed. However, it was nice to explore the city during this time. I also took another flight to Da Nang (Vietnam) this week because I prefer to have a beach around. Long story short -> I didn’t accomplish everything.
Physical Animation
Trying to replace the animated hit response with physical animation was worth it. I like the result. I think I will blend it with some animated hit response, especially for the melee weapons. For them, it looks maybe a little bit too rubber-like.
Epic Fail
I worked on the wrong physic asset. These are used to configure the physical behavior of your character. I selected the zombie mesh and navigated with the option at the top right corner to the physic asset. Unreal pointed me to another physical asset since I replaced the skeleton of the zombie mesh with another one.
Lesson Learned: The details panel of your mesh shows you which physical asset is used.
It took me way longer than I am proud of to figure this mistake out.
Splitscreen
I tried two different approaches to enable crosshairs for the split screen. The first one was using the HUD class. The main benefit is that manipulating it via C++ is relatively easy, and that’s about it. I had to create everything with split-screen capability in mind.
The second approach was using a User Widget. These can be just attached to the player’s viewport. So you can design one HUD and apply it to multiple players without worrying about what it will look like on a split-screen view. Making the crosshair interactive is a little more annoying since I have to use Blueprints. (Blueprints don’t work well with git. I can’t see the diffs, and since no one reviews what I am fabricating, it is handy to see the diffs before I commit a change)
I decided to use the second approach since it feels more flexible and easier to adjust in the long run.
Road Map
I thought about the road map and what I should focus on in the following weeks to reveal my game. I created some tickets in my backlog, and if everything goes as planned, I should be able to show the game in 3-4 weeks.
Next Week
Next week I will focus on the gameplay with melee weapons, bow, and unarmed. I will also add the first interaction between players.
