School Project - Collect Fuzzies
This project was done entirely in blueprints as it was one of my early projects that I then extended into a fuller game with more features. The objective was to collect the bird-like critters in the allocated time with their movement and spawns changing based off their type/rounds gone. Additionally, the landscape would become more and more populated by random spawns of trees and rocks to get in the player's way. It was really interesting trying to figure out more complex actions and scripting using blueprints.
Fuzzy movement logic:
Type 1 - pick a random direction and apply force in specified intervals to move in different directions
Type 2 - Float off the ground - moving based off the angle/direction of the ground
Type 3 - Move away from the player's direction in a slightly slower speed than the player
This was a part of my second year courses in the game development program at Southern New Hampshire University. This game consisted of round-based gameplay performing different objectives with rotating challenges involving different AI scripting in blueprints. I leveraged several different techniques like random spawning and different algorithms for creating AI movement for the NPCs. The main objective is to collect all the “fuzzies” in the allotted time and each round the way they move, their color, and how the AI controls them change in addition to the landscape having more rocks and trees spawned to get in the way. I was able to use lots of neat tricks like timelines for level movement in addition to utilizing the game mode blueprint as a variable storing database. This made different logic “persist” through rounds as I reset objects in the level and changed things once all the fuzzies were captured. I learned a lot about variable management, complex actions, and had a lot of fun writing the different behaviors in blueprints now that I had a better grasp of them. Additionally, I worked a little on a pseudo-shader to make the outlines of selectable/interactable objects (there’s a picture in the project). Finally I was challenged by the variable persistence in addition to keeping things paused or not when the game reached an end game state like losing or winning – and figuring out that issue helped me develop a pause menu and fix my start menu graphical issues. overall I learned a lot about nearly every single element in this project and was able to improve and add polish to almost every single aspect of this artifact with each iteration of polish and revisions.
