Sunday 29th October 2023

Blog Entry 1

This is the introductory blog to my final year project as such I will go over what I aim to do for this project. I hope to make a game with similar mechanics to those seen in Persona 5 however instead of the turn-based combat I would like to make a combat system like that seen in the Batman Arkham games. I will not be going into depth on either of those games here as they will probably have the mechanics covered when I implement them and what would take me a thousand words to explain here can be explained better by a quick google search and watching a YouTube video.

I will achieve this in the Unreal Engine using pure C++. This will be a challenge as while I know a lot of C++ Unreal C++ is completely different and Unreal does not provide much support for C++ and all of the online forum posts are about blueprints.

This week I had a proof of concept demo with my final year project supervisor to explain what I wanted to do for the project. The demo went well and my supervisor liked what I had to show him, especially the gameplay parts of the video.

The video had only 30 seconds of gameplay which just showed the camera volumes I have made and a first rough attempt at a time manager class. The camera volumes are essentially areas which when the player walks into them the camera is set to a fixed location to give the game a more “cinematic” feel. The time manager attempt includes an enum that affects the direction of the directional light in the scene, this is done to make it visible that time is changing and does not have much to do with the time manager part.

This project will most likely be very long and difficult considering the challenge I have set of using pure C++ in the Unreal Engine however I am confident that I will be able to produce something I am proud of.

Over the next few weeks I hope to get the time of day management working.

These blogs may be pretty short as I do not want to go too in depth about the code I have written as I will almost certainly fall into the trap of analysing every line of code I have written. Also I intend for these blogs to be brief updates on my progress not detailed change logs like a published game would get as this is to me a personal project.