Ryan Cooke-Ward's Portfolio

In keeping with the recent theme of AV work on the blog, I would like to finish up with a small showcase of the soundtrack, and some assets. A lot of the visuals are still a WIP and are all untextured. I quickly threw this together because I was looking to get the sound work on the blog, but unfortunately blogger doesn't allow for just sounds. There will be another post on texturing further down the line, once I am finished with most of the models. Now that I have given a good go at the AV, the blog will be a mixture and balance of Visual stuff, followed by some more architecture work and blueprints. Project Management The aim is to have the assets textured done by the 14th of April. The rest of this week (Until the 7th) will be spent getting UVWs prepared for texturing. After that, by the end of the month, I should be in a position to continue working on the game. The latter half of April will be spent getting the core mechanic of the game sorted, including a spell/abi...

The best news first: I'm half happy with what I have as a soundtrack! Soundtrack Before I go too into what I have created, I want to acknowledge the way sound works in most recent video games. A lot of horror games in particular, and a lot of Triple A titles have orchestras at the composers whim, to be able to create atmosphere, rather than song. For example, being able to crossfade certain tracks when a player views something in the background. The most classic example of this is the jump scare in horror games, suddenly slamming down on a piano or sinister strings slowly fading in. Whilst this is a great example of what audio can do in games development, this isn't my aim with my project. Instead, I want to take a step back to the NES era of themes. I'm not suggesting I can create a theme akin to Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy, but having a theme play in an area will be easier (and harder at the same time) for compositions sake, and perhaps for coding as well. For sure ...

One of the implementations I really wanted to add to the inventory system was being able to move the widget around. Drag and Drop operations, as it turns out, aren't as simple as just drag and drop. A whole new BP must be created that will be used by whatever it is you want to drag, and several functions must be overwritten to do so. As mentioned in the previous blog post, I have started this project again, as the backup I had wasn;t totally up to date and it could stand to be a lot more cleaner. If you have been following along, there is a chance some of the variables or blueprints may not be the same. As always, if you read this blog post and would like more information, please view the original tutorial by youtube user " Unreal Gaime Dev " The first step The first thing to be done is to create a new BP with a parent class of "DragDropOperation." There is nothing required in the construction script or the event graph, it simply requires to vari...

Just a quick word - I am in the process of writing up this blog entry, but it should be said that the current version where I had more widget work as well as a merchant has been lost and corrupted. I have kept multiple backups, and have only lost maybe 3, 4 hours work. It's not the end of the world. That being said, when I started this project I really really was clueless. About programming and unreal itself. So, despite being 10 or so hours deep, I have opted to start again. A lot of file structures I had were not simple to find the blueprints necessary, I wasn't properly up to date with unreal and tried moving a lot of assets around which only duplicated a folder because it was still in use in another location, and a lot of the coding and variables read pretty horribly as well. So, with the interest of trying to become a more neater, stricter programmer, I have started fresh! This time, I'm aware of some mix ups with file structuring, I don't have starter content ...

To top the day off and give the blog a little bit more attention, I want to showcase some of the assets I have been working on. Originally I was working on a more complicated asset for 2 hours every week, however I recently decided to get a lot of the smaller assets out of the way first, as I was finding myself slowly chiseling away at the intended asset list and not having much to show for it. Texturing is still quite a way off, and a lot of these assets are still in a whitebox state. The busiest, most populated level in the project will be the marketplace, which will require a lot of small assets, and a few of these I would like to show off in a blog post! Please bear in mind for the time being these are untextured save for one or two of the assets. Seconded to Crates, Barrels are an easy way to flesh out any level in almost any setting. Many games will have these be destructible or contain loot, but I'm afraid given the nature of my project I'd much rather have them ...

Unfortunately, every time I screen record, the unreal engine crashes. So, I'm instead going to have to backtrack through what I have already done to try and showcase it in several screenshots instead, so that I can upload a small amount here and there whenever I have added something to the games blueprints! Woo! The following posts will be following an already existing tutorial that I will be talking through, made by user " Unreal Gaime Dev " - Please make sure to watch his tutorials and show him some love, whilst this inventory isn't clean or crisp, it is a very well functioning inventory using physical slots instead of a list. I just got done adding a very very simple currency system that currently isn't used anywhere else in the game, that's something that will come at a later date. Instead of spending two 6-hour days coding, I figured I'll stop until tomorrow and show the blog some love. The screen shot dimensions may be a little off on the ...

Quick explanation of why there wasn't a blog post last week! I had originally intended to have a video uploaded as there was a lot I wanted to talk about regarding blueprints, and audio design, although the main reason was to showcase the inventory system I had been working on over the previous weeks. Unfortunately, trying to record the inventory system crashes the screen recording equipment and crashes unreal at the same time. I am trying to find a work around, although a lot of the functionality would require gifs or videos. The inventory system at the moment is still a WIP, although it is coming to a close as I start preparations on the crafting widgets and blueprints to start the games core mechanic. Currently, the player can drag and drop the location of the inventory, right click to access a menu of actions, read maps, drink potions, stack items, and sort the inventory by pre-determined categories, as well as discard x amount of the stack of items. A lot of these would be...