The year coming to an end.

The school year is coming to an end, and so is my obligation to write on this blog. I might continue posting on it from time to time, as I plan to keep studying after I finish this course.

It has been a great year and I have learned so much through it. I remember starting using Scratch, which was a great way of being introduced to games development, but unfortunately a very limited tool. 

1st Level of my Taco Vengeance Game

Scratch programming

More on HUDs

So I was meant to publish this post last Friday, but it was messy and I was busy over the weekend working.

Anyway, last Friday I did some more work on my HUDs, and I'm almost finishing them. I did the objective panel that appears showing the next objective. I was very easy to create it, create a square, cut one of corners, add a texture to the background, stroke and then the text. I will have more of these with different text, stating the different objectives, but the same layout.

Pop-up note showing next objective

Programming day.

Back to work on my level, I decided to do some more programming today, I set up the teleporter rooms, but haven't done any programming on them yet because I don't know how I am going to link them yet. I am thinking of asking the player questions which he'll answer by choosing one of the portals, and the wrong answer will lead him to a room with enemies.

One of the many portal rooms

UDK game update - Troubles continue

I am having a problem with my AI bots on the last floor. They spawn but don't move, they just stand still. I tried fixing that by adding a pylon, but it doesn't work because it can't find a ground position. I've been doing some testing with pylons and landscape, and found that if I have a pylon on a higher ground, one on lower ground, and connect their area with a staircase, the pylons will form a path on that staircase. 

Pylons creating path in staircase

Damage blood HUD.

Today I started creating my game HUDs, I started by creating the blood that shows up when the player is hit. I created two of these, one showing up when the player is hit but has high health and one for low health.

High health damage HUD

Adding enemy AI

The focus of today was adding enemy AI to the game. First I started by adding a bot on the first floor that greets you warmly with plasma shots. I've also added a little Matinee sequence in there to show the player where to find a weapon.

After that I started adding AI to the last floor. The AI in there is spawning randomly and will go after the player. It should be the most difficult fight for the player, as the fog will be limiting the vision and there will be lots of enemies.

I successfully created the code for spawning randomly, but had problems with the AI not moving around. I still haven't figured out how to fix this, at the moment I am trying to copy and paste this level in a new file. I think the problem is in the navmesh, and hopefully creating the level again should solve it.

Enemy AI spawning at random places

Creating custom HUDs.

A new Image Processing assignment has come up, this time I will be designing my own custom HUD's for my 3D game. For this I will be using Adobe Flash and import the .fla file to UDK. The first step is to install the ScaleForm extension, there is a very good tutorial to do that in YouTube. It uses an older version of Flash but it doesn't make a difference to me.