Game Off 2024 Journey

A story about my journey through a new challenge- Game Off 2024. We gonna tell everything that we made to achieve our final product. Everyday updating with the news. Stay tunned! 😊 ## Day 01 - 02 Those firsts days were reserved for planning the game. We had already thought about which game style would like, even before the game had started. So we take those days to refine the idea and change little things to fit the theme - SECRETS. The game will be a manager clicker, where player would need to create recipes given by NPCs, very basic, but we need to think that we only have one month and have to do everything from graphic assets to song and music assets. This will be hard, but we are surly will be fun. ## Day 03 - 04 After deciding which style the game will have, I finally started creating the project on Unreal and setting the camera. As I said before, the game will be like a clicker, so I had two options to make- First would create the full game as widgets in Unreal which would limit me a little bit in what I want to do, well, the second option would create the game in a top-down like perspective and make the character invisible, so would looks like those manager game, like Cities Skyline and other city building. ## Day 05 This day was more easy, I started to make some main assets, but quickly realize that somethings will not be possible or too difficult for me to handle in this short time, so I changed some plans and started smaller. The basic idea is create a overcooked like game, but super simple and with a twist, instead of a restaurant making food, you will make potions with essences. You will have 5 essences types- Fire, Water, Earth, Magic and Disorder. Each potion will be made by merging two essences, and the combination will be discovered by player base on hints that the clients will say. They will come at random times and them make a dialog that contains the hint (This will be where we will fit the "SECRETS" jam's theme). ## Day 06 I started making the main mechanic of the game- Combining the essences to make a potion. So as this is my first game on Unreal, I was a little lost, so I stated very small- adding the text to ui and trying to change this base on click of some static mesh (This is a Unreal term, if you want me to make an article with the simplest terms of Unreal, mail me 😊). <Img src="/article-images/personal/game-off-2024-journey/day06.gif" name="Change text on ui by clicking a button" alt="Change text on ui by clicking a button" /> ## Day 07 - 08 In the day 07 I could not do so much because I was busy with work, so I did a lot in day 08. First, I needed a occlusion mask because the whole game will be running inside a building like a tavern, so I need the player to see through walls. I follow a very good tutorial about it and increase the details with a comment I saw here: [video link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6W7pLF2GwU) and the comment is from **@JAMbosco**. I just did not like how it glows so much that interferes into the objects color, but I will try to solve this later, most because I wanted to add the potion crafting system. Day 8 I also change the UI a lot, because I thought with myself and realize that the game will be almost click, so this mechanic has to be simple and fun to play, so I did some drawings and got the UI changed a lot and probably will change tomorrow too. But besides that, I also implement the potion selection logic before into this new UI. <Img src="/article-images/personal/game-off-2024-journey/day08.webp" name="New UI elements" alt="New UI elements" /> ## Day 09 -12 I need to confess that I procrastinated a lot during this time, specially because I was tired from work and just wanted to watch One Piece theories videos, but even so, I also did a really great addition and a very necessary clean up First about the addition was the NPC dialog box that will have a random request for the player to craft. When doing this, I realize that my code was garbage, I did not plan good enough and was everything kinda messy. For that reason, I made a full clean up in everything I have done. From the essence selector to crafting station, and even the logic of the items. Now they are classified as S_Item, a structure that has name, sprite and everything that an item need and not just an Enum of what essences are needed. I made the items using something I never used: a Data Table, and is very easy and helpful, because I feel that if I need to add some different type of item, will not crash everything. ## Day 12 - 17 I gotta admit I am a little late in what I've been planing. I a blink of eyes, we are already in half of the month, and I should have all the game ready and just do some optimizations, but I haven't and now, I need to compensate this in the last days. A project planning is difficult and you need to have your goals not just organized, but also realistic. I did not did this. But that is ok, because I already know how to compensate, and will be using free assets from the community. When I started the project, I wanted to do everything, from coding to music, modeling and assets 2D. That would be ok if the scale of my game wasn't that big and if I already knew how to do those things, but I am a starter in game development and learning all this is hard. But that's why I entered in this challenge. I will make this game no matter what and you can be sure that soon enough you will be playing Mystic Cauldron. I started the day trying to build the project for the first time. Yes, I haven't build until now, I discovered this is a very bad practice because everything you do in Unreal, can cause a build error, which the log does not help too much. But fortunately the only error I got was: ``` LogCook: Error: GameDefaultMap contains a redirected reference '/Game/MainLevel'. The intended asset will fail to load in a packaged build. Select the intended asset again in Project Settings to fix this issue. ``` And this error is saying exactly what I need to do: Just reselect the level in the project settings. This was caused because they have the wrong reference, which I think was because I changed the location of the level, but I am not sure. What is important is that I made the my first build 🥳 I also cleaned a specific widget from crafting station, because it has a LOT of logic inside, from the crafting to balcony, with a lot of event binding so I added some comments to remember this later. At end, I added the remaining recipes in the data table for be ready to use in the NPC dialog logic I will do tomorrow. ## Day 18 I finally made the NPC request system, although need to add something else, like the sprites and the complete quest system, I am more than happy to what I could do today. ## Day 19