Week 06

Ahoy there! Week 06 has been a busy and long one, with treasure to unearth, menus to build, and UI gremlins to tame. We’re inching closer to a polished game experience, with major progress on both the art and code fronts. From above-water animations to shiny new inventory systems.

This also marks the end of our very first production sprint! Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned a ton, not just about game development, but also about planning, teamwork, and wrangling Unreal Engine into doing what we think we want. It's been a wild ride, and we're proud of how far we’ve come. With new skills under our belts and clearer goals ahead, we’re setting sail into the next sprint with renewed energy and excitement! Check the rest of our DevLog to see in more detail what we’ve been up to this week!

Art

Animations 

More animations are in production, this time focussing on above-water gameplay. Take a look!

Environment

We've finally started adding more life to our islands! To all the biology-heads, yes, those same plants actually grow on Caribbean islands! There are palm trees, mangroves, beach cabbages and even bromeliads!

Particles 

More particle effects! Previously we had a few select effects, but now the particle production is gearing up to create engaging effects. The player needs to receive enganging visual feedback so they know their action was successful. Keep your monoculars on the lookout for more in the future.

Code

Digging Mechanic

This week we wrapped up the digging mechanic! Players can now dig up buried treasure chests, and when they crack one open, a burst of shiny coins pops out. They can run around and pick them up, and everything they collect gets added to their trusty pirate pouch.

UI

GUI Navigation

I also tackled some UI work already.  The game now starts on the main menu, and players can navigate into the game from there. It’s a small thing, but it really helps make everything feel more cohesive and game-like. This was a pain to figure out though... Unreal has a built-in system for controllers to navigate buttons on an user widget but there is not a lot of documentation on this stuff unfortunately. After lots of trial and error, I was able to figure it out!

Player inventory UI

Working in Unreal Engine is always exciting. When you start adding a new feature you will never know what you are going to get. Sometimes you estimate 3 hours of work just to discover that Unreal has an already implemented method...
This week I wasn't so fortunate. We started our working to finish the inventory system. The code part was quite easy and now I just needed to make our inventory data appear on the screen. In Unreal we use widget's for that. Widget's are the closest thing to black magic I have ever seen. Sometimes everything will align properly, then you look away for five seconds and suddenly all you items have decided to be the size of half your screen. 

In the end I did manage to tame all these wild widget's and now we have a inventory for each player that displays their items and coins.

Respawn systems 

We Rounded of the respawn systems functionality it still needs some tweaks and adjustments. 

Projectile system 

We started working on a projectile system to launch multiple types of items. There are still a lot of bugs that need to be fixed. The main launching functionality is already working now we only need the remaining projectile types to pass it to the launching mechanism.