The Final Frontier

So I've been having thoughts about what to do for next semester, and I'm a little unsure.

I wanted to create a new project in a first person perspective that revolved around piloting a spaceship to meet an end goal, be it dog fighting or racing other ships.

The twist on it was that the player wouldn't use the controller to control the ship, rather control the pilots hands and, through extension, the ship. This would make the player reach for different controls such as a thrust, a steering stick, as well as redirecting power to different parts of the ship to ensure the pilot achieves their goal.

I also thought about the opportunity for cooperative play, with other pilots taking on other roles, such as an engineer to repair the ship, or a gunner to fight off incoming threats.

On the other hand, I just read your feedback Josh, and a summer of polish would be a great opportunity to expand the project even further, create more levels, more spells, more enemies, and try to incorporate an entirely new element to the project which, right now, I have no idea what it could be but with 5 months I'm sure I could make something great.

What to do...

A Challenger Approaches

On Friday I submitted a video for my second semester Practice module. The main body of work came in the form of a video (Link below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-oYN5As7Bg&t=3s

For semester 3, I'm a little stuck on how to proceed. On one hand, I really enjoyed this project, and I loved coming up with ideas on how this world works, but on the other hand I wanted to look into controls in Virtual Reality.

Unreal Engine is very VR friendly, so I'm confident in creating a prototype, but my main issue is access to the equipment. Working on a VR project means I need unlimited access to a VR headset, and I can't afford anything close to that. My solution is to use the VR in the studio office, but then there's another issue- From August to September the studio is closed, meaning an entire month without work.

I'll mull it over with the tutors, and see if there's absolutely anything that can be done about the VR situation.

For now, I'm continuing production on my last project, starting today with making some potential enemies.

I'll create some ideas for new levels outside of the forest area, thinking up some cliff/mountain/volcano area, featuring the spiky on the far right.

I've been making shapes and seeing what comes out of it, and it's been giving me some cool ideas for new spells to include, but I'll have to make the actual enemies first.

Updates soon!

Almost Time

Tomorrow I submit for my Practice 2 module. I have 2 levels working, both made as an introduction, but one of them is probably gonna have to be scrapped due to being pretty poor.

I've got a character casting 10 spells with different combinations of inputs on the right stick, and 2 enemies in place that can attack the player and be defeated. One of them has a complex brain, making them able to execute different attacks depending on a number of variables.

So what's left to do? I want a proper save mechanic where the player respawns in an appropriate checkpoint space, rather than at the beginning of the game. I also want an actual save game, where it saves more than just the player location, although I'm not sure what I could use for it.

Lastly, I want collectables, and this will tie into the save game. Collectables are nothing new to me, I've done my share of them. Just a brief matter of putting them into the game.

It's gonna be a rush.

Let's do this.