Week 22, Year 2: Bleurghprints.

Now in the second week of development, our Oxford level for Alice's Adventures Off The Map is starting to take shape. My main responsibility in this project is the Engine, so I'm assembling the level from the ground up. Rather literally this week as I've been focusing on the terrain.

Using Unreal Engine's Landscape Feature was new to me but, at least on the surface, I found it really easy to grasp and I was quickly able to add the bumpy, cobbled streets to our level. However creating the Landscape Material was much more difficult. I wanted to be able to paint in the grass and mud, and have it blend with greater weight in the cracks of the cobblestone; a task which proved quite a challenge.

After many errors, a lot of engine weirdness and a good deal of help from a tutor, it's finally working. I'm nowhere near satisfied with my textures but they'll have to do for now and at least they're working!

I also got heavily into Unreal Engine's Blueprints this week. I've dabbled with them a little in previous projects, but now I'm really diving in. My goal was to create a scalable pickup system with interactive level objects and implement the crouch and jump mechanics noted in our level layout below.

Implementing the crouch and jump pickups was a piece of cake. Fun fact: the jump pickup literally is a piece of cake. The secondary scalable pickups however are something else entirely. Stupidly, I did the harder pickup task first. I had it working for a single, glorious day. Then I implemented the other mechanics and it promptly broke for no apparent reason.

Currently, I've no idea how to fix it. I will fix it, but there are countless more important things I need to get working and hey, maybe it'll fix itself...Ha! Yeah, not bloody likely. But on the bright side, in my week with Blueprints, I fixed more features than I broke, so I'm calling it a win.

Finally, some exciting news! I managed to grab Industry Workshop tickets for Anya and me, in the 10 minute window before they sold out. It's all the way off in September, but I'm already looking forward to filling up my inspiration balloons before my final year. It's going to be so, so good!