Greeting and welcome to newsletter # 15!
The latest video dev log has been released on YouTube and can be found here:
Last few weeks:
Its been a while since my last update due to issues getting the new damage particle system working. I detail my struggles in the dev logs above but in short I was able to get them working the way I wanted but I had to rework my design multiple times to work within the limitations of the Niagara system.
I spent some time working on the dagger attack as well. It required adding tags to prevent attacking when the player was climbing and when you were in the process of attacking to prevent spamming attack. I had to make some adjustment to the parkour system to pass the parkour state into the Unreal Gameplay Ability System. I also worked on refining the targeting for backstab and death from above but its still a work in progress.
I also tried to address a vulnerability in old .Net libraries I was using which led to me reinstalling the operating system. In the end it turned out I didn’t need to reinstall but while I was working on those updates I also switched over to a new analytics provider PlayFab, and installed the Steam SDK plugin for future integration.
One thing that was relatively easy to add and made the death animations a million times better was ragdoll physics for the guards. I set up the physics body for the guards and had it enable half way through the random death animation which worked out really well.
Another bit of low hanging fruit I was able to finish was the skybox. It took a bit of work to get the fog to work well with the skybox I setup but I’m really liking the results. I have to add a few more towers in the distance as part of the level generation but I’m already liking how everything is looking.
During this time I have also made numerous improvements to the back end code and cleaned up quite a bit of my old test code. I also upgraded to version 5.4 of Unreal engine and have been testing it out. So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had any issues. I’m doing this to get ready for the dialogue plugin I’m going to be using which only works in version 5.4 or better. It will cover all my needs for this game and has a lot of customization options so I can tweak it a bit as needed.
Push to store page release:
I plan to only send out these newsletters and do some video shorts once a week for the next month while I focus on getting the store page out. I’ll probably still do my long form dev log videos but only once per month as I feel they are taking too much time away from developing at the moment and I need to meet a few milestones. Look forward to having the store page up and really showing everyone what this project is all about!
That is all for this update,
Tony D
Cronoforge Studios Inc