I am getting more comfortable with UnrealScript by purchasing a new book, Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide [Kindle Edition]. This book is written by Rachel Cordone and is great for people looking to start UnrealScript, like myself. It teaches you everything from the ground up and gets you right into UDK. I recommend this book for anyone looking to start coding in UnrealScript. The only thing I changed up from what the book teaches was using Microsoft Visual Studios 2010 to actually write the code.
After our staff meeting we were assigned the task to create two or three prototypes. We were given three options. One prototype option is one that would spawn different types of enemies on game start or with the click of a button. The second was to have these enemies that spawned move to a location on the map and change state, like fire an animation or shoot a weapon. The third, that my team member Andy Poquette pitched, was to design a tower that would take damage and get destroyed when it reached zero health. With this pitch from Andy our professor gave us another option to make the tower traversable and have functioning doors and ledges like we had mocked up in the previous week.
We had chosen to do to what we thought to be the two most code heavy prototypes from the start. This is because we want to get these mechanics up and running as soon as possible to have more time to design and polish later in development. After all, we only have three months to develop this game. We also had the task of updating our game design document and making a rough draft script for a video presentation we had to present to our college the following week.
Last week I was assigned to do the AI for our bots, which was one of our prototype options. My plan was to make the bot physics kick in, their animations enable, follow the player, and shoot within a certain distance. Unfortunately with my inexperience in UnrealScript, I had a bit of a hard time getting the bots to follow the player and fire their animations using UnrealScript. I also had a hard time getting them to hold a weapon because I had only ever programmed custom weapons using UTweapons. Thankfully our lead programmer Andy Poquette caught this, and we now know how to get the weapons working. I also forgot to call a default enemy controller in one of the functions I coded and that is the reason the bot animations were not working and why the bots were not following the player.
I then turned my attention to checking up on the GDD and video script to finish out my week. The only thing that sucked from last week was not being able to make the Red Bull Gaming LAN that came through Orlando over the weekend because of that snag with my UnrealScript coding. I was disappointed, but happy that I was able to get the code finished even if it took a little extra time after the weekend. This project is going to stay at the top of my priority list until finished so I have a great portfolio piece to add to my collection.
This week we needed to produce a video to present our game design to show to our college were professors and students sat in and asked questions once done watching the presentation. I will help with and study programming again, general game designs, and level design. I also video edited and produce the video for my team. This was my main focus to be sure the video presentation was up to par with showing all the students and professors in our degree program. I wanted to also try to help out our lead programmer, Andy Poquette, in any way I could to get our base mechanics up a running and code placeable with nodes in UDK Kismet for our none programmers to visually script. I also dug out my level design, game design, and UnrealScript books to make sure I have reading to brush up on during my down time. Anyway I can benefit the team, right?
(Pre-Production Presentation)
On a side note, my website is finally under development! I will keep everyone updated through Twitter, Facebook, and here on my blog. I am always looking for talented people to work and network with. Feel free to follow this RSS and my Twitter feed, friend me on Facebook, and connect with me on LinkedIn!
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