Devlog 7: Elijah Jackson: Keep Up The Fight

"Keep Up The Fight"

Elijah Jackson

05/21/2025

Game Abilities:

My main focus after completing the UI updates was to get more gameplay features working. I began by creating the ability system for new abilities to work off of. This system functions very similar to the weapons system I made prior, with the base class having all necessary functions for abilities while the child classes hold ability specific data. 

This system allows for the swapping of abilities on the player in a similar way to weapons, with the large difference being that abilities require no spawning new actors like weapons do.

The Electric Punch:

Next, I got to work on the electric punch ability in the game. At its core, it is an ability designed to control crowds of enemies by damaging multiple enemies at the same time.

After creating the electric punch, I migrated the dash ability over to this system to allow it to be swapped with the electric punch ability at runtime. I plan to expand upon this framework with the creation of new abilities in the future.

The Explosion:

My next item to establish was the creation of an "explosion" actor for dealing splash damage and knockback. The purpose of this was to create something that could be used in the future for other abilities and for weapons that deal damage to multiple enemies at once. Currently, the explosion is very simple and has editable damage, knockback strength, and destroy time.

The UI:

The last thing I worked with was the UI. To start, the player needed some form of feedback when they hit an enemy other than the enemy health bar updating . As seen in the above video, I have added a hitmarker to the player's crosshair in order to show the damage of enemies. This allows for the end user to see that they are hitting something in addition to helping us ensure that the collision functions are being called for enemies.

To further enhance the UI, I worked with my girlfriend Caitlyn to create some new assets for our game. The goal being to enhance the UI and make the game feel more complete. I also sourced a font online that better matched with the setting and theme of our game. The end result shows a less unfinished version of the UI that aligns closer to the feel of the game that we are looking for. The current state of the UI looks like this:

Coming Up:

Going forward, I plan to work more with the weapons to make each weapon feel unique by adding spread, shot accuracy, recoil, weapon upgrades, and weapon abilities. The end product of working on the weapons like this should be weapons that can feel vastly different by editing properties through blueprint and adding abilities. I have done some work on that system thus far, but don't plan on sharing anything until the next devlog. Thank you for reading!