Cam - Games Dev

When we started this Games Jam, I decided that I wanted the challenge of working on my own as a test on my skills and a show of how much I had improved. It also allowed me to let my own creativity flow, with no boundaries to hold me back. I started with many ideas for this Games Jam, but eventually settled on the idea of a stationary tower shooting at ever increasing waves of enemies. This base premise is something that I stuck to the entire time. It was quite a challenge on my own, but it allowed for me to not have to rely or wait on others completing the things that I needed. The biggest struggle was being able to do the work of many on my own in the same timespan, but I managed quite well to create a functioning game in the limited time. The above screenshot shows all the code inside the player character blueprint. This includes things such as the aiming and shooting of the projectile. It also includes the health management and regeneration of the character, as well as choosing whic...

 I have done a lot over the course of this year, making many mistakes, facing numerous challenges but ultimately leaving with far more knowledge than what I went in with. I have spent most of the year learning and developing my coding skills, with only a very basic understanding at the start of the year, which I have built up into creating my own Tower Defense style game. This game started as a Games Jam project earlier this year, but is something I have continued with well after then to create a playable game. I have also spent some time working further on my 3D modelling skills, something that was reasonably developed prior to this year, but still needed some work. I learnt much more about 3DS Max over the year and I also started to look into learning other software, namely Blender. Progression was very slow with Blender and I have still been unable to fully pick it up, forcing me to put it on the back burner for a while. I have gotten far better at both coding and 3D modelling, ...

 We use numerous models in our game to bring it to life, all of which we have created ourselves or with help from classmates and teacher. Here is a few examples of some of the asset contributions I have made to our game. Most of these revolve around the player character, with the Screwdriver and Flashlight both being items that the player will carry with them for the majority of the experience. I also create the model we are using for the player themselves. I created these models using 3DS Max, a software I knew relatively well prior to this project, although I did try and learn Blender to make some of these models in. With the timeframe I have, I was unable to learn enough of Blender to be able to make a sufficient model. This is something I can work on over the Summer Holidays and during University, as it is a skill that would make me a better games developer.

The character bp in Breach includes a large amount of code, allowing it to perform all of the mechanics and features that we require. These are a few screenshots of the player code from very early on in development, when we had some different plans, such as viewable items in the inventory and very limited item interaction. A lot has changed with the code since these screenshots were taken back in December, but the core of most of these mechanics has stayed the same over the last 6 months. Here are some screenshots of the updated code, showing the changes and development of our ideas over the course of this project. This shows the major changes and additions to our code since December and how far we have come in both ideas and skills as developers. Most of this coding is stuff that we would have been completely unable to do at the start of the year and it is amazing to see how much we've improved since then.

 On Friday 3rd of May, we had our meeting with the Norwich Games Convention that we are going to be showing our games off at at the end of the month. We spoke to Ellie Buchan, discussing our plans for our stalls and talks that we plan to do during the event, as well as running through power points to run over what our game is about, and what we would be showing off. We were given feedback, and told that this event will have many younger children involved, so we should be careful with the content of our games, whether making sure not to include it, or provide appropriate warnings prior to playing. Nothing really needs to change with Breach, as while it is a horror, it doesn't delve into many themes that would be unsuitable for the younger audience we may be faced with. Some cutscenes have some strong language but these can easily be removed or bleeped out from this version of the game. This can definitely be done in a humorous way, such as the Ship AI bleeping out the language. Refl...

 The development of our cutscenes has been a long process that is still ongoing currently. We had to initially voice act our entire game, working through our scripts and gathering the audio we needed for all the cutscenes and voice lines we had planned. It took a while but we completed it and could begin work on the cutscenes and dialogue system. At the time of starting work on cutscenes, we had only really gotten the first room sorted out, so I started with the dialogue that would occur in there. This is only a short cutscene and is the introduction to the game, setting the scene and informing the player before they get going. It is a simple cutscene that involves the Player and the Ship AI. Its main intention is to give the player an instant sense of urgency while also setting the scene to them. It is a straight to the point cutscene that tells that player what they need to start out with, but not forcing an end goal on them straight away. After escaping their cabin, the player w...