Hey guys here's my first update on the project but first in case you haven't read about it; the game consist on have a mix between a dating show and a hitman game, I'm using Unreal engine 4 with their visual scripting solution.

some of the milestones for the project.

1. -Having a basic AI system where they transition between different states.
2. -Completing at least a level with different execution options.
3. -Having a distraction system for the AI.
4. -Dialog options that you can chose from.
5. Sound and atmosphere to the level.

Today I woke up with enthusiasm only to be greeted by the empty team on crowdForge not going to lie that took a dip into my mood I was hoping to at least work with someone, but oh well I pat myself on the back and carry on, I started coming up with ideas and researching the unreal as much as possible.

I followed some tutorial on Unreal ai , here are some of the results.

to be completly honest I didn't learn much I know the use a tree system to alter between states and they expose variables to get different behaviours, tomorrow I have to get my hands dirty with the little I learn If I want to make real progress.

I decided to finish today in a high note, and it is something that I recommend you all do as well, you don't want to lose motivation on your project, so the trick is to set aside and hour or two before you feel tired or angry, and do something that you are really confident with, it could be modelling, animating, drawing, writting anything that you cosider it's going to drive you and it's not going to take a lot of effort in your part.

To me that is modelling so I gather some references of what I wanted to build on pure ref https://www.pureref.com/

here's my mood board 

the models in blender 

that's all for today if you have any questions regarding software or thought process I'm always willing to help out so don't hesitate to reach out.

Don't worry, we're all new to this and many of us are in this alone but we're all here to help each other. Like you I'm new to programming but seeing the results you already have I'm sure you'll be able to make something out of it. No matter how simple or basic it may seem. Heads up ! I can't wait to see more. :)

So the work continues, I have some behaviors now on the AI next is to add this to a behavior tree.

wow i'm really curious about how the dating show and hitman parts tie in together!

Hey guys I'm back at it again yesterday I couldn't work at all in the project but I got some really good news, I posted on different forums that I was looking for some help and I'm glad to say we got a new adition to the team,  Sprattstud will be joining on this little adventure, he will be focusing on the coding side of things and I will put a heavier focus on the 3D now.

Here's how the enviroment is coming along, tomorrow I'm going to finish the jukebox tweak the scale of tables and chair and texture them as well.

Got a minimum viable product with a couple bells and whistles, but nothing to fancy. Players can move around within the world, talk to an npc with various dialog options, as well as kill them. There is also an exit in order to make your escape.

Hoping to flesh out other AI and behavior trees over the next day or two, as well as get an early functional prototype before the weekend. Will likely post a few sneak peaks of game play as time goes on. Stay tuned for more updates. ^~^

Hello guys sorry I couldn't find time to write yesterday but I did work on the modular pieces, and today I also got the first playable character which I named Sila she is going to be "the Date"  I did some test for the animations as well but tomorrow I'm going to make an animation player or whatever is called in unreal to set different states. 

I was researching how to make characters in an easy an fast way and I came across character creator 3

 https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/production.html

Now fair warning the program does work well for rigging directly to unreal and the overall the program is very easy to use BUT you are very limited by the amount of customization, if you use zbrush and marvellous designer I can see the program coming to life but don't think of this program as a way to remove character creation because that's not what it is, you still have to do some lifting. I chose some of the standard preset the reason being, time ! I only made a full character once I don't have anatomy studies under my belt so this was a lightsaber ;)  for me.

Internet is bad so can't post images it seems (sad face). And since yesterdays post didn't post because of that, and I have even more to say now,  I hope y'all like novels (change log/tl;dr at end) ~

Main menu system has been rejiggered and now has a name enter and gender selection screen that changes the dialog boxes as well as your model in game. The default settings are a little easter egg, but the player can freely choose any names and any gender combinations.

The dialogue system was completely rebuilt in order to create a better user experience. The windows can now be moved on (and off) screen as the player pleases, allowing for multiple chat windows and conversations to be going simultaneously. I wonder who can get their date to fall in love the fastest? That's right, the love meter is fully functional, get that baby to max out before the date's over and you win! But your date's not the only one with a love meter, so you'll have to decide if you want woo your date or the mysterious waiter in black. Or maybe your a love expert and won't have to decide, and taking both home will be a breeze.

A settings menu was added as well allowing the player to choose various resolutions and even toggle a full screen mode. These settings should persist each time the game boots up.

Started doing a little work on the behavior trees, with any luck the date and waiter will be able to do something other than idly stand there and listen to me blabber on and on about my 'ceps (hidden easter egg spoiler anyone? hehe). El fideo rubio also set up a git repository for us so we can start merging our work together. I hope y'all are as excited as we are for the coming days as the game is quickly becoming more and more functional fun. Hopefully the next dev log will have even more goodies for y'all.

Until Then~

SprattStud ^~^

tl;dr

Change log

• Added name entry and gender selection to main menu
• Dialogue boxes are now moveable and fully functional, including the love meter.
• Settings menu added with various resolutions and a full screen toggle

Coming Soon

• AI behavior trees
• Models and all the good stuff that comes with them

Here comes fideo with all the Audio visual content you retina needs haha BIG THANKS to SprattStud he is doing amazing work on the coding side, like he mentioned I started a repository so our builds should merge into one I feel like a kid the day before xmas.  

Today's accomplishments

-I optimize the character to 38,000 tris ( still has a lot of materials  but we will let that unless I consider it disrupts the performance )

-Added a punching animation, sound clips for the footsetps.

-I also tweaked the pysical armature a bit but it needs more tweaking.

-Set up a clean project for Spratt and I to have a standard build

-Created the github page and we have a main branch now.

WE HAVE A SPACE PROGRAM TOO XD.

The enviroment is coming along nicely I just need to finish the kitchen and bathroom for it and I can start populating it with some decoration.

Still lots of work to be done today but I'll post a quick update since I didn't post yesterday on account of real life being op. Yesterday I managed to complete the majority (would be all but I probably forgot something) of the AI behavior trees and blackboards. There's still some tweaking to do of course since the game isn't logic driven, but I'm pretty confident I can get the AI to do just about anything at this point based on the players story choices.

Today I'm dedicating to fleshing out the story/dialogue. I started making the the dialogue trees on paper, then scripting them into ue4, but that's a hassle and pretty boring so I'm taking a break to write this devlog.

Also, I hope I'll be able to merge El fideo rubio's work with mine so that we can get the AI in their proper environment and finally get an idea of what the final product is going to be like.

Short but sweet post today since I'm still working, hopefully more good news will follow in the coming days.

Until Then~

SprattStud ^~^

tl;dr

Change log

• Prototype AI behavior tree are complete
• Early dialogue trees to create a simple story

Coming Soon

• Code and Model merger
• Story with a beginning, middle and end

Today I was messing with door hinges setting up a rigging system for our animation and so on here are some pics 

Had some family stuff pop up so didn't have much time to work on this over the last few days.  So it's just a short change log today. Added the dialogue tree in its entirety to the game. Still some bug squashing to do, but there's roughly 13+ different outcomes currently. If there's enough time I'll add in a few more hidden endings. That's it for today though. See y'all next time.

Until Then~

SprattStud ^~^

Change log

• Dialogue Tree finished

Coming Soon

• Game Over (/Victory) Messages
• Bug Squashing

The game is out and you can try it https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-winter-2019/rate/371760

I just wanted to post my thoughts before I hit the sack, ok so we finished the project and for that I'm proud it surely is going to push me to pursue and create more experiences, so to the interesting bits what would have done differently.

- Having an early builng, I didn't got to play the game untill today and that is bad! , we took a long time to set up the github and even more to get a playable state, thus the direction of the game is not clear, as it is right now is just an old 90s text adventure with a 3d background.

-Clear focus of the project and limitations, I spent about 5 days researching animation alone and even thought in the end I learned the basics and made about 10 animations only 1 of them made the cut because of iterations and time.

-Aiming for perfection the first days I would make such a detail prop that it will take me 3 days to finish I quickly realiced that, this is a game jam people don't come here for eye candy stuff they come for games and props are just thing in the background make as many of them as you can and don't stop ( just for breathing ;) )

Those are all the things I could have done better but let's end with the things I learned.

So as I mentioned before I learned how to rig the manequin and retarget animations which turned out to be super useful, one of my youtube teachers was Jim Kroovy he has a whole series on how to set up a rig for the mannequin and how to export it to unreal 1 to 1 100% recomend watching even if you are not going to use unreal or rig the mannequin you can learn a lot of tricks for rigging.

I learned that I need to improve my comunication skills organization in general if I want to make for a good lead, In the beginning it was just me and I had a broad idea but then Sprattstud joinied me and we would have short meetings but we never went into the details of how does the game tie to the theme how is it fun how is it different which I think if could have aid us in the process.

I learned a lot of unreal trick and thing that translate to unity almost 1 to 1 for instance I thought setting up a hinge system was going to be dificult but is was even simpler that unity,

Lastly what would have like to add if I still had time.

Like I said the killing animations, the interactions with the environment such as changing the music on the jukebox being able to steel the money on the cash register those sorts of things.

I hope you all had fun creating your personal projects and interacting with the other creators and we any luck I'll see you guys soon :)

Spent a day reflecting on the project and here are a collection of my thoughts. to an extent I am quite proud that el fideo rubio and I managed to more or less get a working game completed, but at the same time it is nowhere near the level of completed that I had originally planned on. When we started making the project, I ended up planning out virtually all the features, and gave them rough time frames usually taking about a day, or maybe a few small ones that consumed a day. For the most part, even when I had errors and mistakes that I had to correct, I was able to stay on schedule. That being said, a 90s text adventure with a 3d environment is not what I had planned for. i had stuck to my schedule, and planned things accordingly, so where did I go wrong? While I gave myself well enough time to complete each individual goal, as well as enough time to complete the project, I was forced to take several days off for my family. As it turns out, I forgot to take that into consideration so as the final days approached my plan was looking good until it was the last day and I had about 2 days left of stuff planned out. Oops.

That being said, I though about and reflected upon mostly this issue, and came to the conclusion that at the end of everyday I need to spent a few minutes reevaluating my plans. It'll be super simple as in most cases I'll scim over my notes and go yup, everything still fits within the allotted time. But if I ever run into a deadline issue similar to this one, then I'll know when to start cutting things out. For example, I would have cut out the waiter dialogue and replaced it with in game kill animations like we had originally wanted.

All in all, I would say as far as learning goes, this game jam further reinforced the skills that I knew I had. I was constantly struggling with this and that going along, but given a bit of time I fixed the issue and did so within my original time constraints. That being said, my biggest issue is not planning enough. I could have cut a lot of time out if i had just planned a little bit more in the beginning. As I made blueprints for the actors and UMG, I realized I had a lot of stuff that could be reused here, and slightly tweaked here, resulting in me remaking parent classes and ultimately wasting time for something I should have done in the beginning.

At the end of the day I had fun making this game, and realized that my flaws are ever present, and I need to continue moving forward sharpening my skills and finding clever ways to minimize my flaws. but that's enough rambling for now, see y'all when I release my next project, which will hopefully be complete, lol.

until next time,
SprattStud ^~^