#Week 5

#Week 5 

The one with the "free the actions" revolution 

As mentioned in the previous post I struggle going into the university provided facilities to work on the PC's I need. So I tried and come up with compromises and solutions this week. I try to do any work that doesn't requires specialized software in the library and when I do go in the specialized rooms I try to go with a friend as I feel that this makes it easier to stay for longer time and get some work done. I also try and avoid certain rooms and listen to music with headphones on to try and distract myself from the surroundings.

Boardgame

As the play test revealed having character cards with specific combinations of actions that the player can use in their turn restricted them too much and made many turns boring as the players couldn't do any actions and had to pass their turn. So I have decided to restructure the way actions work. Players are no longer restricted to a set combinations however I have decided that there will be "slow actions"(sleep, avoid, attack) and "quick actions"(search, move, explore). In each turn a player can either use two quick actions or one quick and one slow action. This avoids from players getting "stuck" with no actions they could do in their turn. I also decided that they will be able to repeat the same action as in the previous turn as I wanted the game to feel more like an RPG rather than a strategy game and felt that this strategy element of planning the actions didn't feel right.

In Engine

I never worked with UI elements in unreal before (only unity) so I decided to have a look into this and start to structure how to navigate through the game. I followed the Unreal documentation to set up a simple Menu to start with. 

I also started to implement health bars for both characters which proved itself to be quiet challenging. As I have to characters in the the scene the engine would only recognize the first character as an active character and would only track their health but not from the second character. I was able to fix this by creating a game instance outside of the level that would save the health values for both characters. There are no actual hazards in the game (except from falling of the map which will also end the level) so that the health doesn't tracks injuries but how many times the player swaps between characters. This makes the puzzles a little more challenging as the players have to swap characters mindfully. 

Next week I will focus on how the monsters work in-game as they appeared too late in the play test and were a little too random.