Big Game Project, Week 1

This is the first week of the production of a game for our class Big Game Project.
I’m in a group with three other people, Two graphical artists and one other programmer.
I will have the role of a programmer and I chose to not take a lead role in this project so I could focus more on production and learning. The game we make will be a dungeoun crawler with a camera view similar to that of Diablo 2. The motto of the game is play what you kill. So basiclly if you kill an NPC you are allowed to play as that character. The game will be made with Unreal Engine 4.

I have spent this first week to learn the layout of the unreal engine and focusing on working with Unreal’s Blueprints. Blueprints is a visual programming tool and you can make a complete game with it without writing a line of code.

How it works is this, It starts of with an event node (Red on screen) or a function node. And from that you draw a white line that is the execution line and then make a new node that does something.
For example. The red node above “Event Begin Play” is run once when the game starts and then the white line goes to “Create PickupText widget” wich creates a component to handle text to the screen in this case.

Everything that follow the white line will be done in that order. I must say it takes some time to grasp all elements in blueprints but there are many helpful tutorials from Unreal and from the community to get you started.

This week I have been focused on lerning the basics of this system while creating a HUD and some GUI elements like an inventory. Here is a screenshot:

In it you see two bars, Health and Speed they don’t do anything at this moment other then the visual.
I also created a pill object with a floating text that you can pick up into your inventory.
While in the inventory you can choose to use / consume the pill, drop it or cancel the action.

Next week I will try to migrate some of this into our real project and create some other components for our game.