This development log details all work done on the project during post-production. This details work done from 9th November to 6th December.

Week 9:

During this week the following work was done on the game: HUD juicing with widget animations, enemy AI perception updating, aim assist fixes and variable aim assist amounts depending on the spell's info, the creation of a trigger that will change how many enemies spawn and at what rate, status effect fixes (bleeding) and the addition of the burning status effect, spell casting being able to be done from hands as well as the staff now.

Additionally during this week the enemy AI was optimised a little bit with some cooldowns on the EQS that they use to navigate the level, some quality of life changes to switching spells where you can now hold down the button to cycle through your spells. Also the charmed / turned status effect was implemented in this week as well as some more fixes to the enemy AI and setting up the info for status effects for spells to use.

Finally some more gameplay juice was added with camera shakes being added for various actions in ranged combat and spells themselves, e.g. the AOE explosion and firing a spell to name a few, also functionality for the burning status effect to spread from target to target was implemented during this week as well.

Week 10:

During this week some quality of life changes were made to how the players will aim their players with both the mouse and with controllers, for mouse the player now aims to where the mouse is in the world and for controllers the player will aim to the joystick direction depending on the camera's rotation.

Additionally melee "spells" were started to be implemented during this week. At the start of the week enemies were changed to select a random spell from their array of spells but later in the week this changed with the enemies now being able to switch between spells with a new task in their behaviour trees.

Also during this week, I, Harry, bought a plugin - the Mixamo Converter Plugin for Unreal Engine 5 off of Fab / the unreal marketplace - which would allow us to use the artist's models rigged with Mixamo with the animations that we were already using from other asset packs like the master combat animations pack for the melee combat. Using this plugin during this week we were able to implement multiple of the artist's low poly meshes in the game and use them with the animations we were already using whilst only having to create new skeletons for each model and retargeting all of the previously used animations to use the Mixamo skeleton and then creating only one new animation blueprint for all Mixamo skeleton models.

Furthermore, during this week the boss' second phase was implemented which triggers at a set amount of health depending on the boss and then begins to spawn enemies in an area around the boss of a specified type. Further work was done with implementing the status effects with the spells and their characteristics, such as AOE etc.

Also during this week all of the spells and their info was created and put into the game with the VFX for the spells from two different asset packs: Rocket Thruster Exhaust FX - https://www.fab.com/listings/5856e437-bb4a-4215-ae6d-6c93b429a37e, and Mixed VFX -https://www.fab.com/listings/6518971c-c8ca-47d7-8611-1ff068b78dd5 - which were used for the 4 different types of VFX that the spells could use: shoot VFX, travelling VFX, charging VFX and End Of Life VFX using Unreal's Niagara particle system. Furthermore during this week all of the player data, enemy data and display data for players and the spells in the game was implemented as well.

More work was done during this week for the HUD and UI in the game as well with some more of the artist's work being implemented for the UI and HUD. Also some changes for the balance of spells was done during this week with the general lowering of the time required to charge spells to keep combat fast paced and chaotic.

Also the animation blueprint was greatly optimised during this week to use thread safe functions to acquire the required information for the anim graph and animation blueprint in general to function which allows for the animation blueprint to use multithreading and to decrease the resource drain for this, thereby improving performance.

Finally during this week some changes were made to the navigation of enemies with the removal of the camera borders being able to affect navigation of the AI. Also in the last day of the week I, Harry, discovered that the enemy AI controller was corrupted causing enemies to not move properly which was discovered after many hours of testing and redoing all of the enemies functionality. This was fixed with changing the parent class to something other than AI controller and then setting it back to AI controller which gets rid of all of the extra data for the class including the corruption which then fixes the AI controller.

Week 11:

This week was used for testing the game and attempting to balance the game for both fun and fairness, whilst also ensuring that the game could be played properly and was fun for the players.

This week was also spent getting all of the artist's models into the game and ensuring that they worked properly with the animations that were going to be used for the game.

Also modular difficulty was implemented this week were the number of enemies that will spawn to swarm the players and the carriage is also dependent on the number of players in the game with the number of players increasing the amount of enemies spawning.

On the Tuesday of this week, we conducted a small playtesting session with some of the first year programming students on campus. During this session we acquired invaluable feedback on the game as well as discovering bugs that needed to be fixing for the final submission version of the game and the showcase version of the game. During this session, two of the first year students played the game whilst Harry and Ben watched and wrote down feedback from both those playing the game and the students watching. This feedback included both positive feedback, criticisms, and suggestions as well as bugs being displayed in the game.

After acquiring feedback from the playtest session various changes were made to hopefully better the game during the remainder of the week including: changes to the camera zoom amounts, fixing bugs found during the session including charging a spell whilst going into the downed state, adding a point light to the bottom of the player's mesh and increasing the size of the player indicators as well as changing the colours to be set based on the player index and to be brighter all in an effort to help players identify themselves easier in the level.

Additionally floating damage numbers were added to the game this week, which Harry had created in a previous personal project, and were tweaked to fit the game more which also helps to make the damage feel more impactful and easier to track.

In addition, during this final week the reviving functionality was advanced to include holding down the revive button when in range of a downed player and then also added functionality for the edge cases of reviving including: moving or being knocked away from the player you are attempting to revive, stopping pressing the button and finally the player themselves going downed whilst trying to revive someone else.

Also during this week, boss dialogue was implemented as well as boss introduction and an advancement to the boss' second phase was implemented making use of the boss dialogue system and the camera system that was already implemented with some more advancements. Furthermore the game over and game win screens were properly functionally implemented for controller this week as well as the actual functionality for the game to be won being implemented.

Some more fixes to various systems were completed during this week as well, most identified from the play testing session on the Tuesday, including: fixing an issue with players being forced outside the camera borders, an issue with the game starting countdown starting when it shouldn't. During this week we also worked with an audio student to further get more audio into the game so functionality was implemented during this week in various systems to play specific audio cues.

Furthermore during this week we implemented functionality for characters having multiple skeletal meshes on them, some of which had cloth simulation active. Finally during this week functionality for the use of groom actors was implemented since some of the characters used groom actors for their hair so we had to adapt and implement specific functionality for spawning the correct hair for the character that is being spawned in.

Week 12:

During this week and the end of the previous week the work that was done was final polishing and making sure it was ready to be built and played at the showcase during week 12. This included final additions of models and textures for these models as well as the adjustment of various debugging features that were still in the game and the recording of footage for trailers etc.

Also during this last week some more audio work was done and implemented into the game. Additionally some compression of 4K textures was done during this last week to ensure that the built game would be below 1gb and therefore could be uploaded to itch properly.

Week 4 was the final week of the semester and included a showcase at a local bar in Liverpool where students from both and second year came together to show their games and work done for their respective games.

Personal:

Harry - Enemy AI, spell aim assist, aiming update, spell cycling, spell hand casting, enemy spawn trigger, charmed / turned status effect, spell / ranged combat gameplay juice, enemy spell selection, implementing artist's models with already in use animations, boss second phase, enemy spawning director, spell VFX, spell info, player info, enemies info, display info, animation blueprint optimisation, fixing AI controller, modular difficulty, playtesting session, boss second phase, boss dialogue, reviving advancement, game win and game over, bug fixing, cloth simulation

Ben - playtesting session, melee spells, melee spell VFX, audio implementation, added models, HUD graphics update and juicing, sound for status effects, status effects: bleeding and burning, cinematic mode (removes HUD), marketing

Louis - 

Mackenzie -