What goes with marshmallows? Bonfires

The primary platform for Retro Blast is mobile with the focus on making it a fun quick "commuter" game with a lot of depth to it.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S6 and an iPhone 4s.
I push builds to my S6 and play the game on my commute, this allows me to actually play the game for fun and takes me out of "dev mode" so I can really identify what is wrong with my game. (At the moment it's the lack of a "goal" more about this in a later post)


I recently installed the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update and I had locked down UE4 at 4.9 so I would have a stable engine to build Retro Blast, unfortunately 4.9 has a texture rendering issue on Android 6.0 so I was forced to grab 4.11.1.

4.11.1 did fixed the texture issue, but it also broke a few other things that were working....
 

Issues:

  • High speed physics collisions no longer effect the actor rotation.
4.9.1 4.10.2

Fix:

Turned off CCD on the root which had (no collision anyway) CCD was turned on for both the static mesh and the root sphere.
  • When physics items are detached they do not retain the momentum their parent had.
4.9.1 4.10.2


Fix:
From what I can tell attached and detached items get their "set simulation physics" reset now, I just added a "set simulate physics" on the Release Item event just after the detach.

  • Held boxes have no collision
4.9.1 4.10.2


Fix:
The boxes are attached to a "PickupArea" collision cube, it looks like in 4.10. The attached object inherits the collision information from the component they are attached to, previously the collision cube was set to Query only, I set this to collision enabled and this fixed the problem.

  •  Held boxes cant be dropped
4.10.2 4.11.1


Fix:
I used a "Is overlapping actor" bool linked up to the EndOverlap, which was incorrectly firing constantly...I'm sure I've had an issue in the past where an event was incorrectly firing...


There is another bug that the upgrade caused where ribbon particles no longer render but from a quick search it seems like it might be an issue that I can't fix at the moment.

I was meant to spend my weekend implementing cool new features but instead I've been on smore eating duty... I mean I did manage to find the time work on a camera collision shake for walls that is separate from the damaged state.


Feature creep is real

Hello, it's been an entire month since I last posted an update!

Since then I have done the following:


I was running out of space in my floppy disk sized brain, so after looking into a few solutions I decided to opt for using Trello as a project management / feature tracking tool.

I breakdown features by priority, this allows me to focus on a single important feature, instead of getting caught up on smaller details.

  • Roped in an Audio Designer.
I'm mediocre at most things but my audio abilities aren't even palatable to my own ear, so to help give the game some much needed atmosphere and feeling I've found myself an audio designer.

  • Set up my own dedicated Perforce server.
Which was easy thanks to the creator of this YouTube playlist.
I've done this for two reasons:
  1. Copy pasting the entire game folder to archive and have a backup is poor practice
  2. This allows other people to work on the project with me

Things I've done to the game:
  • Added basic VFX
  • Added the first implementation of the regenerating fuel resource system

    I made the fuel grow exponentially overtime which was a bit of a pain to figure out but it was something I really wanted to learn how to do.

    I had two options

    1. Make int multiply by the power of 2 then clamping this to a range which would give me a constant growth over time for my fuel.

    2. Use a timeline from 0-1 and multiply the value.

    I went for option two because it gave me more control of the curve and length of time. The downside to this is (as far as I'm aware) you're unable to change the time of the timeline during runtime. So regardless of the max value it will always take a static duration of time to reach max.
 
  • Added a basic TouchUI
  • Changed boost to a button
    (I over engineered this swipe to boost system and a lot of people couldn't understand it without a lot of explanation)
  • Added a very basic textured 3D model for a ship
  • Implemented a more advanced camera interpolation system that zooms out + tilts when moving fast in a direction
  • Begun writing code for design elements/actors!

Retro Blast - CL40