Hello and welcome back to another chapter of the "NHS Hopewood development blog" In this weeks chapter we will be going through process of importing assets into the game project as well as some patch work to try and improve the prototype for the first deadline.
Firstly I received the assets from Annie via an email, this contained all the assets and its materials as well as instructions for setting up the material of the Opel asset in Unreal Engine.
This is all the data and instructions mentioned above which was extremely useful for me in quickly implimenting the assets and getting them to work.
After everything was imported I had to convert the raw texture files into usable materials, this was a simple task as I just followed Annie's instructions and used the material editor to import the texture samples and connect them to the right nodes within the material.
Pictured above is all the assets implimented into the corrisponding blueprints. This was done by simpily adding a Static Mesh component within the blueprint and then using the model and materials for the end reasult. This did cause some problems for the game as I had to resize the assets in the blueprint editor to make it in scale with the rest of the game; adding the assets also caused a bug in which non of the collectables or obsticles would work in game due to a problem with the collision, this was fixed via updating the collision settings within the Static Mesh components of the blueprints and updating the code to corispond with the Static Mesh rather than the primitive shapes which was used beforehand.
Now that the assets were implimented I took some time to also try and improve the game build and attempted to fixing the touch controls. Firstly after some testing I adjusted the spawn weighting of the objects that spawn on the tiles during gameplay improving the quality of life for the game and made it more enjoyable, I still feel like it could be tweaked and improved upon but for now the balance is pretty good.
The touch controls unfortnately is still not fully working, I managed to get left and right movement to work with help of the tutor during my level productions lesson however the system is still not working to how I want it with the character jumping with every movement input making it almost unplayable using touch controls. With there being just over week for the first build deadline I feel a compromise will have to be done for a proof of concept prototype.
This concludes this weeks chapter of the development blog, my short term goal for next week is to get the protype ready and to be playable on Android devices for it to be shown to my team as well as Andrews administration team allowing valuable feedback for the project.