This Week in Fullsail

Today marks the first day of my running blog series. I plan to make weekly updates regarding my progress in my studies at Full Sail University as a record. This will also help me improve by recording my performance to look back on old projects.

Week One of Project and portfolio - Life and Death

This is the final submission I submitted for the first week of my Project and portfolio class. In this asssignment I was tasked with creating a spike actor that I used to add challenges to the various levels. In the first scene, I painted the ground with spikes, adding challenge by having them disappear after jumping. The second scene showcases the same spike but instead flying across the screen from left to right and right to left. This requires the player to run across as fast as possible so they don't take too much damage. Finally, the last scene shows a large gate. To open the gate, you need to find two buttons that turn on two different lights near the gate; when both are on, the gate will open. I had a lot of fun in this assignment and learned a lot. I learned about materials and textrnderes because while implementing the final gate I wanted the text to be changeable perinstance and have a feint pulse based on that color. To do this I took the Vertex color and the vertext color and the vertex color multiplied by 0.25 and lerped them by the absolute value of a cosine with a time input value. this makes the alpha change from 1 to 0 then back to 1 over the desired perioud of 2.5 seconds. so the final value occilates from 1 to 0 back to 1 over the course of 2.5 seconds.

Independent Learning Activity One - Your First Hour in UMG

This was an independent learning activity that I followed along with to learn and then implement the Unreal Motion Graphics system in Unreal Engine to create a Player HUD. The HUD reacts to changes in player statistics to accurately reflect ammo count and health. In this learning activity, I also created a complete gameplay loop for the player to switch between the gameplay level and another main menu level to restart the level as many times as the player wishes. This activity was fun because it was the first time I had implemented a full gameplay loop, It was straightforwards and simple to understand after I got past some compatability issues from the now depreceated input methods used in the video.

Independent Learning Activity Two - Blueprint Communications

In this independent learning activity, I gained a deeper level of understanding when it comes to blueprint communication. I used the level blueprint, direct communication, event dispatchers, and blueprint interfaces to let the player interact with the world. This coursed Line up with what I had already learned in previous classes and while it didnt provide any new information helped refresh my memory on Blueprint Interfaces and informed me of the level blueprint.

Overall I learned as lot this week and cant wait to use this knowledge on some personal projects coming later in more posts as I make further additions to this blog in the coming weeks untill I finaly graduate!