Contra
Night 005
I took my computer to work today to see if one of our engineers could help me troubleshoot what was going on. The good news is that I set up Perforce correctly! This is a proud moment for me as that was an intimidating step, but I have overcome it. Props to Perforce and their easy to follow setup instructions.
The inconsistent behavior I was experiencing in was actually a setting in my levels. It was set up to take each actor in the placed level and taking every change made to it as it’s own separate change, rather than allowing me to just check out the entire level, modify it, then submit it. Once we figured that out, I made the change in the level itself and it worked as expected!
Night 004
Tonight I fought with Perforfce setup and got most of the way but I’m not experiencing the same caliber of engine integration as I have at work so I may need to ask someone for help.
Night 003
Night three is all about getting the level set up to be blocked out over the weekend. I still have a lot of gameplay stuff to incorporate, but because it’s been about six weeks since I last touched this project, I need to do some art related stuff to get my bearings again on it. I can’t just jump back into Blueprint.
I found a ripped version of the background from Contra through a quick Google search, created a plane, and set up a material in UE to map it correctly to a very wide plane. This allowed me to quickly lay in platforms that match the structures of the cliffs of the map.
I scaled the background relative to the scale of Manny compared to a screen from Contra. Obviously there are a lot of camera tweaks that need to happen to match the feel of the level, but again, this update was all about getting some cool looking things to reignite myself on this project. I added a spotlight to the character blueprint as well just so we can get some light on it during the development.
Now that I have the pieces in place, I need to pause so I can figure out how to get a P4 Depot setup so I can submit iterations of Blueprints that work which will allow me to continue to experiment and break the Blueprints but not lose progress.
Night 002
Night two started off with good intentions but ended with me just creating a flashy lighting setup for my future horrible animation content.
My buddy Kevin walked me through getting the Mannequin Control Rig in and set up for animation modification. I spent a little bit of time fiddling around with the motion state machine to see if I could get the flip working but it was unsuccessful. I think because there is a jump already in the state machine, I need to treat the flip as an input action in the same way I did the sprint.
Established an Animation Working Level
Created a Level Sequence w/ the Mannequin Control Rig baked to the looping fall animation
Created additive layers for a flip pose
Created additive layers for a flip rotation
Messed around with the state machine a bit to see if I could get this working, but gave up quickly and went back to the level sequence
Watched the character flip while I dicked around with lighting and post process effects.
Next steps for me are to:
Hook up flip in place of the regular jump
Tweak timing and look so it feels good
Look into importing a Mixamo front flip animation to use for this
Night 001
I spent the first night of this project setting up my sandbox environment in UE5 and getting the camera and movement axes locked. I got some additional character locomotion set up by altering the jump heights, turn, and fall timings, as well as getting a sprint and a slide triggering. The slide only triggers an on-screen debug test because I didn’t have any content to hook into it.
For the main setup, I followed this tutorial by ACDev on YouTube. The tutorial went over the ins and outs of getting setup and organized with modified versions of the ThirdPerson project. The tutorial focuses on getting movements added and updated with the Enhanced Input system, which it sounds like is the preferred way to do these things.
Side Scroller Character Blueprint
Side Scroller Game Mode
Side Scroller Player Controller
Jump height
Jump speed
Turn speed
Fall timing
Sprint
Slide (debug print screen only)
