Oddity Alley Review 3/2

Oddity Alley

Sarah Brown

Logline- A bright, calm alleyway is full of little hidden oddities and events.

Link to content: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5gce7Te3m6yNWNqT3F5eWk5d28

Old Schedule:

Revised Schedule:

(Due to the fact that the project has long been switched to Unreal as opposed to Unity, I felt it prudent to revise solely the yellow column of the Schedule to accommodate this change. Not much is different, save for the sound test occurred before the animation test, as Unreal has more complex means to program animations.)

Unreal Development:

 (Camera Center Trigger Blueprint)

(Object Event with Sound)

     Since the last review, no new visual assets have been created- the layout is still finalized and proxy models are still in place. These files still remain in the folder on Google Drive. Animation sketches will begin later this week to aid in setting up the animation workflow for implementing the easter eggs in Unreal, along with gathering sounds for each sketch as they are made. Unreal development is going steady- when the switch to Unreal was made, there were challenges in setting it up to get the first game prototype deployed to my phone to test on the Gear VR, but that problem has since been overcome through troubleshooting, and prototyping has been happening fairly quickly as I adjust to programming with Blueprints. 

    The two Blueprints above show the completion of the 'Camera center trigger' and sound tests in Unreal. The point of the 'Camera center trigger' test is to set up the player's camera to identify which object its center (where the reticle is placed) is pointing at. For this, a line trace was used, which shoots out a vector from the center of the camera and returns which object it 'hits'. After several prototypes of getting the camera to print the object it was looking at, this was revised to look for a single cube in the scene, and trigger its event in the second image above. 

    There were more challenges in getting these Blueprints completed- the blueprint that generates the player's reticle was out of place by default, and had to be adjusted to sit in the true center of the player's sight. Additionally, as I've never used Blueprints before, there was a bit of a learning curve to overcome, and I was constantly coming across points where I had to stop and learn something new in order to continue achieving my programming goals. Earlier in development I was even at a point where I had to recreate the entire Oddity Alley project in Unreal due to errors I didn't understand, but I've come far since then in working with Unreal to progress with developing the application. Things are definitely picking up faster now that I have a better understanding of the program.