Trebuchete: Final

Hello again,

Yup as normal, I forgot to update my blog. But I’ll happily use the excuse that I was too busy working on the game to think about a blog.

But here we are, last day of Uni for 2014. Let me tell you what has happened since the last blog.

Tuesday. After presenting a post-mortem of my last game “First Snow” in my CIU211 class ( Not the class I’ve been talking about) I met up with Tim ( New programmer that joined the group) and we started to combine projects, my AI with his castle and trebuchets and Rowans map. That all went smoothly, after we decided to update the two older versions to my updated version on Unreal. Once that was done, we didn’t do much else at Uni, so I went home and started to get the AI working inside of the new combined project. And as normal when combining projects the AI wasn’t working at all, well so I thought, until I realised that I needed to put a Nav Mesh on the map and I also forgot that I needed to set the waypoints that the AI will follow. So once I had figured that out I decided that I wasn’t going to have the AI working as originally planned, mainly because it was starting to get late and I had to get up early. So I threw in a bunch of AI at one of the players castles and told them to charge at the enemy and wait outside their gate, and it looked really cool, it would have been nice to get it working properly and I probably could, I have it all coded or blueprinted it’s just seeing as how I’m not marked on the game itself, just the learning I did during the process of making it, I see no point in implementing it. Who knows I might get bored over my break and just do it to see what it looks like.

So that’s it, that is the last of project “Trebuchete” all I need to do is write a Post-Mortem, and quickly fix up my tech doc, and submit, and that will be the end of my first Studio Unit and my second year at Qantm.

I guess I’ll talk about the Studio Unit, just because I want to, and who knows if my lecturer Mike actually reads these, it could serve as a little bit of feedback.

So studio units are a new addition to Qantm, and I was part of the first group to go through it, and I must say, it is so much better than what they had before. I’m not 100% sure, but I think the only time that we could work with designers in a project was in the last two trimesters as part of the major projects, the rest of it was just working solo on projects. I think the new format works a lot better, seeing as how when we get into the industry, working with different disciplines will be a common and expected thing, it’s good to learn what it is like inside of a relatively safe environment. And I can’t forget to mention that we actually get to experience, working in a small group of people to create a product that we desire to make. As someone that wants to get into the Indie gaming scene, that is exactly what I expect to be doing, and it was really fun. It seems that Qantm has taken a step in the right direction and has started to help its students prepare more for when the get into the industry.

I guess before I sign off I should tell you how I went using the Unreal Engine for the first time. It was definitely an interesting experience, it seems like a good program for designers to use, or people that don’t know much about code, mainly because there is almost none if any code writing to be done, it’s all just making cool looking flow charts of pre-made code. I have yet to get the hang of the engine, it would definitely be nice to work in the engine again, just to get used to it. Oh did I mention how nice everything looks in the engine? Well it does, even the stock assets they have look really good, makes it so easy to get a nice looking game up in a short amount of time.

Well I think that about wraps it up, next post will mark the start of a self-driven project that I may start during the holidays, depends on if I get stuck playing all the games I’ve been trying to hold off playing while I work on my projects ( looking at you Dragon Age ). Thanks, to anyone that has been reading these, I’ll never know if you are, hell I’m probably talking to myself, well that’s nothing new.

*Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” starts playing*

Nathan Out!

*Walks away, fading into the misty background*