Plague Wardens

Devlog

• Spawning Logic Rework - Antonio Roldan
  November 18, 2024 by Board Gamers#AI, #Unreal, #C++

  Over the past couple of days, as we've been testing out some of our gameplay, there were quite a few bugs still persisting regarding the spawning of my enemies. On rare occasions the enemies would spa... Continue reading

  
• Surrounding Behavior Improvements - Antonio Roldan
  November 08, 2024 by Board Gamers#AI, #Unreal

  In my last post I described the process behind my new enemy AI targeting system that I developed. This system has lead to much more dynamic gameplay as players now have to deal with enemies spreading... Continue reading

  
• AI Surrounding Behavior - Antonio Roldan
  November 01, 2024 by Board Gamers#AI, #Movement, #Behaviors

  This week I decided to spend some time improving the behaviors of my enemy AI. There was one thing that several of my teammates had brought up that I also realized when it came to the movement of my e... Continue reading

  
• Enemy Balancing - Antonio Roldan
  October 23, 2024 by Board Gamers#Tracking, #Particle Effects, #AI

  I've been spending the better part of a week working with more issues regarding replication as I talked about in my last few posts. The last of these being the particle effects for things such as the... Continue reading

  
• Functional Lobby and More Visual Feedback - Ryan Brown
  October 23, 2024 by Board Gamers

  Let's start with the main thing I did over the last few days: the multiplayer lobby menu. It is now (almost) fully functional. Last time I went over some concerns with how I'm going to get player ping... Continue reading

  
• Network Smoothing - Antonio Roldan
  October 18, 2024 by Board Gamers#Networking, #Replication, #C++

  As promised I have updates on how things are going with replication. If you read my last post you will know that after converting all of my blueprints to native C++, I was having issues with animation... Continue reading

  
• Stratagem Improvements and Menu Additions - Ryan Brown
  October 17, 2024 by Board Gamers

  Most of my work this week has been focused on improvements for player interactions with our menus. Particularly with a large focus on the functionality and display of our stratagem menu on the HUD. To... Continue reading

  
• C++ Conversion - Antonio Roldan
  October 16, 2024 by Board Gamers#Blueprints, #C++, #Networking

  In my last post I talked about refactoring my contributions to the project to better optimize my enemy AI, and improve the overall performance of our game. The largest part of this process was decidin... Continue reading

  
• Interactable Visuals and Other Changes - Ryan Brown
  October 16, 2024 by Board Gamers

  This may be a bit of a shorter post, but another one will be coming on Thursday. Last week, my team and I were impacted by Hurricane Milton, and weren’t able to get as much work done as we probably... Continue reading

  
• AI Optimization - Antonio Roldan
  October 05, 2024 by Board Gamers#Object Pooling, #Optimization, #AI, #C++

  Considering the nature of our project and specifically my contributions being our enemy AI, I decided to spend the first week of this month refactoring and thinking about optimization. What brought me... Continue reading

  
• Steam, Audio, and Directional Nonsense - Ryan Brown
  October 05, 2024 by Board Gamers

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  Unfortunately, there was no big thing I was focused on this week for me to cover. I got a few little things done and spent the rest of the week frustrated at my inability to convert parts of my old bl... Continue reading

  
• Improving Bomb Efficiency - Keith Babcock
  October 04, 2024 by Board Gamers

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  This week a lot of my time was spent converting Unreal Blueprints to C++ and figuring out how to gradually transform our blueprint only team project into a C++ blueprint hybrid. The first step of this... Continue reading
• Designing Levels Without Custom Assets in UE5
  September 30, 2024 by Board Gamers

  One of the hardest things about trying to make this a professional looking game is having no budget or artists. So as I've been working on assets for our first level this week, I've found a couple tri... Continue reading

  
• Replicating Player Animations - Keith Babcock
  September 26, 2024 by Board Gamers

  The Problem: At the beginning of this week's sprint our player's replication was all out of order; sprinting for the client could only be seen on the host, all movement couldn't be seen by the clients... Continue reading
• Interactive Stratagem Popout Menu - Ryan Brown
  September 26, 2024 by Board Gamers

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  A feature we’ve been planning to get implemented finally came together this week, with some important collaboration from our gameplay programmer, Keith Babcock. Stratagems, something we have modeled... Continue reading

  
• Visual Effects on Gun and Enemies - Antonio Roldan
  September 26, 2024 by Board Gamers#VFX, #Particle System, #Collision, #Decal

  A major task I set out to complete this week was making some visual feedback for various actions that happen within the game. My goal was to accomplish the following, a particle effect for the enemy s... Continue reading

  
• Hand IK With Virtual Bones in UE5
  September 21, 2024 by Board Gamers#Animation, #UE5, #IK, #FK, #Swimming

  This week I finally found the solution to keeping hands attached to weapons in any animation state. But before we talk about the solution that UE5 offers, we have to understand three concepts in anima... Continue reading

  
• Spawning Logic - Antonio Roldan
  September 20, 2024 by Board Gamers#Enemy AI, #Spawning, #Hordes

  This week I drafted and implemented logic for how I want our enemies to be spawned in our game. To start with I knew that I would need an empty game object that would act as our "spawn manager". There... Continue reading

  
• Front-End User Experience Design - Ryan Brown
  September 20, 2024 by Board Gamers

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  This week I was largely focused on getting the front-end user experience up and running for our game. From main menu to game over, the goal of having a multiplayer experience complicated this process... Continue reading

  
• Accurate Shooting - Keith Babcock
  September 20, 2024 by Board Gamers

  The Problem: In a third person shooter, a common problem to solve is how can you provide the player with the accuracy of shooting from the first person where you simply have to point the gun at what y... Continue reading
• Editing Animations in UE5 - Clayton Jetton
  September 14, 2024 by Board Gamers#Animation

  Our game's goal for multi-state omnidirectional player locomotion requires a lot of work on animations. This has been a big learning experience considering I am not formally trained as an animator, no... Continue reading

  
• Creating a Multiplayer Minimap - Ryan Brown
  September 13, 2024 by Board Gamers

  This week, I was tasked with creating a minimap that could display a level, be centered on the owning clients character location, rotate the player’s indicator in relation to the direction their cam... Continue reading
• Enemy Targeting
  September 13, 2024 by Board Gamers#Enemy AI, #Behavior

  Author: Antonio Roldan Desired Feature: I wanted the enemy AI to have the ability to target the nearest enemy to it since we are creating a multiplayer game. This feature would make enemies target the... Continue reading

  
• Consistent Strike Jet Strafing Run - Keith Babcock
  September 13, 2024 by Board Gamers#Strike Jet

  The Problem: Create a consistent strafing run replicated across networks from a fast moving strike jet that land consistently between clients, and inline with how the user expects the strafing run to... Continue reading
• Devlog 00
  September 10, 2024 by Board Gamers#Beginning

  We built the project and got it in the Perforce repo... Continue reading