In my class this month we are working in Unreal. The class is called Programming Foundations 2 and it focuses on Blueprint. I was not very excited because I know C++ and really enjoy it, also I have not had good experience with visual scripting languages in the past.
I will say am I very surprised at how well thought out Blueprints are. They are never going to be my preferred method of scripting but I can definitely see some uses for it in my future projects. Especially with animations and UI elements. I can also see myself using it to prototype and test before I create the C++ classes needed. I have not dug much into the shaders and materials yet and I am looking forward to that as well with Blueprint.
On to my work for the day. Today I implemented a health pickup item that the player can grad in the level. This was very simple and was almost a cut and paste of the damage pickup. Another thing that was almost copy and paste from a previous feature was the player shields. Just needed to add a couple extra if statements and that was done. I updated all the animations to animations that featured the player holding a gun. I implemented a gun and attached it to the socket on the skeleton for the gun. I also implemented a pickup to spawn at the location of the players death. Did a few other minor things that had to deal with Lerp, colors, and new inputs but those took almost no time and are trivial.
While I know none of this may seem like a huge deal, and it really is not. For me however though it let me dive much deeper into how Unreal worked and the engine editor flow. I also had not done a few of these things, like messing with animations and skeletons, in the past and it was fun to see this and get the experience. The main reason I really enjoyed doing these trivial things is because now I feel like taking the time to implement them in other projects. I use to spend all my time doing the systems and programming for all the back end game things and would skimp or skip visuals because I did not want to take the time to learn them. Now I have, even if it is a very minimal amount.
Now it is time for bed. Tomorrow is a new day of programming and game development.