Devlog 2: Elijah Jackson: Let's Get Fighting

"Let's Get Fighting"

Elijah Jackson

04/25/2025

The Weapons:

With the framework for the player in place, this week was the time to start implementing the combat system. I began with ranged combat this week as I had more experience with creating it. Overall, my goal was to build off the skeleton of combat from last week by creating individual weapons and importing animations for those weapons.

The Pistol:

I started with the pistol because it is a very basic base to begin with. It could shoot and deal damage to the enemies in the scene. The creation of this weapon led to my first major problem of the week: The player's gun was locked to pointing forward at body level exclusively. You could turn side to side, but there was no way to look up and down to fire at targets higher or lower than the player was holding the gun. This meant that there was no room for small enemies or hitting headshots on the current enemy.

At first, I was completely unsure of what to do or how to approach aiming up and down but I decided to look at the examples provided by Epic and other developers. Through this, I discovered Aim Offsets. Aim Offsets are a form of animation blend that responds to where the player is looking. In my case, I could blend animations of the player aiming each weapon with the offset so the game would respond to the player looking up and down. 

Another issue that popped up amidst animating the player and their weapons was making sure that the animations were set to additive (meaning that they could add on to each other). When the animations were not set to additive, it resulted in this error:

I'm still unsure as to exactly why this happens, but it was decently amusing to find during development.

In learning about Aim Offsets, more on animation slots, and animation blueprinting I began to understand more about animation in general. This project has done a lot to teach me about how much animation goes into games and how I can work with and integrate them.

The Rifle:

The rifle functions very similar to the pistol with one notable difference: it has an aim down sights animation. Adding aim down sights was key to making the game feel more complete this week as it allows for better visibility of the enemies and aiming in general. In the future, I plan to have ADS increase the accuracy of the weapons as well as slow the player's look and movement speed for better accuracy. The creation of different weapon animations as well as a different aim down sights animation required the creation of a new animation state machine that would choose the correct aim offset based on the ID of the weapon and whether the player is aiming down sights.

New UI:

Another one of my major responsibilities for the week was the creation of the player's UI. Most of the UI is functional, except the currency and round counts. Adding the minimap in particular was interesting as it involved creating a new player camera and offsetting it away from the player. Currently I don't plan on adding anything else to the UI, but am open to suggestions if anything seems missing. I plan to expand the minimap by adding icons, a full screen map, and unlocking the map as you explore the level. I wanted to make sure the UI made itself clear as it is still in its early phase of development. I accomplished this by using text and image labels.

Final Thoughts:

This week allowed me to expand on a lot of the systems of our game and make the game feel more playable. In the next week, I plan to make the game feel more unique and start adding abilities and player upgrades. The game is reaching the point of needing testing and "finding the fun" which I am quite excited for. I also plan on beginning to balance the player and enemies for a more cohesive gameplay loop.