Pre-alpha game testing day.

Yesterday we worked to get out individual tasks done, my tasks were to find a way of adding spells to the player properly, adding a marker to display what enemy or object was current being targeted and if i got time over, clean up the player blueprint event graph.

Adding the spells properly required working spells, (not really but it would make it easier to see if it was working) so i went straight to making a targeting marker. The way i did this was by making a new blueprint object containing an upside down cone and adding an instance of this as a variable to the Target class which is included in each of the enemies or objects the player can target. I had some issues when attempting to create the object as a child object in the construction script of the Target class where I couldn’t figure out the “Add child actor class”. What i needed to do was to spawn an actor of the TargetMarker class and then add it as a child actor rather than only adding it as a child actor.

What i did was to create two functions within the Target class (Hide marker, Show marker) which create an object above itself and removes it respectively. These functions are called whenever an object is set to be the current target or the current target is changed. The only thing i didn’t finish was actually making the marker follow a moving target.

Today we all had a mad dash to get everything prepared for the game testing session at 1PM, we came in early and spent most of the time putting our individual blueprints together and then making it work. We got most of the things done but we fell just short and in the end the game had a single spell which the player used by pressing the X button on the xbox controller. Other than that our session went well and we got some good feedback. During the session we had someone on another computer making hotfixes which was then pushed and sent to the computer being tested on.

Biggest bug found: When the player casts a spell while in midair it is stuck in “casting” state during which it is not affected by gravity, this state then goes over into “walking” state for a second. The player can then quickly press the jump button to make a jump in midair and cast another spell. Through repeating this the player could make potentially infinite mid-air jumps and make it up to high places.

Next week is the real alpha and we have some serious stuff we need to work in, we are just on the cusp of changing between spells for the player and then we need to make the Harakat spell casting work properly, especially casting spells from stick inputs and combining spells.