Log #5: Sep/5/2024

A poor bug workaround. Talking with a cool team. An Unreal Engine axes handsign. Markdown comes in handy -and a giant frog.

I'll admit upfront that the giant frog is less interesting than it immediately sounds. However, after writing my blog post yesterday, I was not completely finished. I worked a tiny bit on some documentation for a game concept (see yesterday). I wanted to do something different than our "ERASE" project, so I dreamed up a 2D side scroller where the player fights squards of enemies while bouncing off of things, playing as a giant frog. I imagined a fast-paced platforming game. I am not super passionate about the idea, but with images inspired by Rayman Legends and Alto's Odyssey floating around in my head, I think I can find some inspiration to make things interesting. All I did for the documentation practice was write a "core idea" statement, and struggle to make sense of Backlog, the software I used.

Today, thanks to my work yesterday, most everybody had work to do. One thing where my designing had been slacking,however, was the art direction. One of our team's artist was asking me about what desk designs I like for our game, and another was inquiring about the art direction of the game. This led me to realize how undefined a lot of the visuals are for the game. After talking, we came up with a "inviting office with weird ambiguous things spontaneously mixed in". I realize that I need to spend more time working on the visuals of the game. I also realized that "base boards", or, the trim along the ground of walls, needs to be figured out, because with our games mechanics, that can easily look very weird.

I'm glad to have a team to work with that asks questions and contributes their own ideas.

Our teacher told us not to have noisy fidget toys, and not to have them in meetings.

I also found a bugfix for my Unreal Engine tutorial project. I finally figured out how to stop my character from reverting back to its starting orientation. I read on a forum a method of fixing the bug by explicitedly setting the rotation of the character instead of just moving them. After talking to my teacher, though, they revealed that there was most likely just a setting I was missing, and so I'm going to look for that tomorrow. What I did is not the final fix, but it did teach me more about Unreal Engine, I think.

As I was trying to figure out how to fix my tutorial-led project, however, I did find a handsign for learning Unreal Engine's axes in their documentation. You can check it out here.

I'm excited to continue working on the project, I just hope we'll have enough time!

-Luke Knotts