Thursday Is The New Last Sunday

You know, at this point I should just adjust these to come out mid week. But let’s see if I can’t shift things around.

Leading up to this post there was one part I was struggling with. More specifically, it was diving deep into a tutorial video on root motion animation.

There were some very severe mental barriers present when I was originally considering the video. Thinking back, I believe it stems from my discomfort as it relates to animation and subsequent related topics.

Of all the major areas in the engine so far, this seems to “scare” me the most. Really unsure what it is about it. However, like any other topics or domains, once I got into it, things really began to flow. Sure there were moments of frustration, but it really wasn’t any different than the frustration I’ve felt before.

Game Updates

A relatively large milestone achieved this week. I was able to follow a youtube guide on AI root animation.

At this point I actually have the system written in Blueprints, however there are major pieces of it I don’t fully understand. So my intention is to translate all this into c++, and by doing so, familiarize myself with the pieces.

The most complicated part has actually been handling how the zombie will move towards the player. After following a great tutorial on this exact idea, I was finally able to solve the problem I had around trying to get the enemy to move at the player in a “reasonable” way.

Additional work went into creating a stop radius and handling the zombie’s turn towards facing the player while in that range.

Once I’m done translating this to c++, my next goal is to set up health and dying for the enemy. Until next time!

Side note: I’ve been struggling through typing on my new glove 80 keyboard, and although I feel awkward using it still, it’s a stark difference to when I started.