Final Year Project

With the project coming to a close i decided to take this week to tweak and fine tune where ever i could. One of the first things that i wanted to tweak was the overall speed of the vehicle, the reasoning behind this was when i have been doing my casual play testing people have mentioned the fact that the vehicle was a lot slower than what they had anticipated it be, specifically with it being a hover car. To increase the speed all i  needed to do was go back into my player controller and change the "add force variable" that i had created. The second thing that i had done is utilise the whole map and scatter pickups over the map i made sure that when i scattered the pickups that where they were places made sense, for example to boost picks were always available just before a long straight stretch of road so that the player doesn't loose control trying to boost around corners etc. As well as this i jumped back into particle effects this time for a effect

This week i started off where i left off this week and that was with HUD elements, i wanted to try and polish them up as much as i could. with my having my pickups in the game and working decided that for the boost i want a notification or item area on the screen so the player knows they have picked a boost up. I did this by creating UI elements in Photoshop like i did last week and then took them into engine so that i could animate them. When i took them into engine i then create a new HUD element for when the player overlaps with the boost pickup. I then started to animate the elements that i had made within the widget creator, i had animated it so that when the player overlaps with the pickup the item displays on the screen above the players head and then slides over to the top right of the screen out of the way. From there i have the A button flashing to notify the player that they have picked it up and they can use it. Here is an example below of how it looks on the screen:

This week i had not got as much done as i would of liked to, i pretty much focused on polishing up the in game HUD and the main menu screen where all of the best times are displayed. I started with the main menu as i though it was going to take the least amount of time and would be the easiest to get out of the way. I first started off by taking a screenshot of a billboard that i wanted to use in game, from there i then took it into the engine and used it as a background for the menu. I then aligned everything up on the billboard so that it look like the billboard was displaying the best times. I think that this turned out well and you can see what it looks like below. I think that this looked better than my previous main menu where it was just in game with a slight blur over the top. From here i can add some transitions and a loading screen for when the player presses the start button. From there i wanted to update my in game HUD, i  knew i had already made some reference i

After play testing the myself i realised that there was a few bugs that i have been meaning to fix for quite a while and had just forgot about and left until i know i had time, At this point i know i am ahead of the schedule that i had made so i gave myself some time this week to try and fix some of the bugs that were annoying me and stopping me from doing a public play test. The first one was that when i was driving at the start i had noticed a problem where i was constantly spawning and the line traces that control the hover components were getting stuck under the floor meaning i could drive forwards and backwards but i couldn't turn without crashing into a static mesh and pushing myself out of the floor. This bug didn't happen all the time so it was still playable it was just something i was wanting to get fixed and out of the way as soon as possible. the way that i had tackled this problem was to make two scripts, the first one was to see if the player was stuck on

After getting a lot of my core mechanics sorted and working i have decided to try and use my map layout and actually replicate that within the engine using my modular kit. during my pre production stage i went through and created a few different potential map layouts that i might go with and these helped me quite a bit when it came to blocking things out. After a few different attempts this is the racing track that i decided to go ahead with, the reason for this is because it breaks my environment up into three different sections which i quite like and gives the map more diversity. These sections are broken up into, a main high street, a residential area and then lastly a industrial area.  When i first started blocking the level out i did the same thing as what i did a few weeks ago where i started adding barricades around the parts of the map that i dont want the player to go to, i enjoyed this part of the project a lot because of the modular kit that i had bought i w

During this week i have been working on trying to reward the player for taking risks by giving them rewards. As well as that i have also been trying to try and create more distractions and things that are going to slow the player down. For these i started by looking into other games and seeing what type of things that they use, one of the fist games that i looked at was Mario kart and the shell system where once the player has fired one it would hunt down an enemy player and then stun them for a few seconds slowing them down and lowering their highest score. I wanted to try and replicate something like this within my game, i started by creating a script where when the player overlaps with the pickup a missile particle effect would play and target the player and from their disable their controls for a few seconds and stun them. As well as this before the bomb drops on the player i have created a widget so that there is a cross-hair that will search around the screen for the pla