Devlog 1: Elijah Jackson: Crafting The Player

"Crafting The Player"

Elijah Jackson

04/18/2025

Player & Animations:

This week my effort was placed towards setting up the base for the player. During my work, I wanted to make sure to build a base that could be effective to work upon going forward. In creating the player, the initial input setup was not very challenging but I encountered my first major roadblock in learning to import content into Unreal. In my prior experience with Unreal I was provided assets that were verified to work with each other and were ready for use immediately. However, this project has me learning about the pipeline of sourcing and importing assets that not only work, but fit the theme of the game that I am making. Just finding the asset for the player took me a significant amount of time. Importing that asset took a while as well. This all led into the major problem that I experienced. Animations. The player needs animations to convey actions and in the case of melee combat to inflict damage. I found many animations online, but ran into the issue of them not being compatible with the player's model.

After some research, I discovered that Unreal Engine had a tool for animation retargeting. After messing around with the tool in other projects I discovered that I could retarget some of the default animations to work with this new player model, allowing both the use of the animations and the player model itself. I then ran into another problem: I was missing some needed animations for the player. By default has a walk, run, and jump animation but not a strafe animation. I was able to find animations on Mixamo, but they didn't import into Unreal correctly either.  After this, I found a tool that helped move Mixamo animations into Unreal which led into all the animations being mapped to the player correctly. Finally, I created a blend space & animation blueprint for the player to have a moving and animated player in our game.

With the blend space functioning, the player was animated for movement in each direction as opposed to just forwards. However, our animations can look a bit odd on this player model still but they serve the purpose of communicating actions to the user while we get higher quality animations created.

Weapon System:

Another task that I took this week was the creation of the base weapon system. Different weapons and abilities are how our game will differentiate itself from other games. With that in mind, I'm building the frame of our weapon system to be easy to create new weapons in. The structure of the weapons will be a base file that includes functionality that all weapons will need to function, then a file for both ranged and melee that include their basic functions. I have begun work on this system and already have the frame setup to put a weapon in the hand of the player. The goal is that new weapon creation will be as simple as sourcing assets and defining any functionality past the base for each type.

Final thoughts:

Over this next week, I'm going to be working with combat and getting the combat systems in place. I plan on making two of the weapons that will be in the final game and getting more of a feel for the combat. Thank you for reading! Talk to you all next week!