Blog Birthday(ish)

Wow, I've been doing this blog for my project now for basically a year. I think the monthly “sprints” and blog posts have worked out a lot better than trying to do weekly post like I had originally tried with my custom engine project. This project has definitely helped me learn a whole lot about UE4 development and has been a great place to test and experiment with the technology.

How ‘bout a few stats! My first changelist for SRPG was changelist #200, submitted in July of ’17. It's crazy to think that I started the UE4 version of the game that long ago. When I started this blog last year, it looks like I was up to changelist #452. It looks like 8 of those changes were actually to a game tool I noodle with making for the Star Wars: Armada miniatures game. So (do a little math and) that makes 244 changes over about 21 months. As of today, I'm up to changelist #816, so that's another 360 changes in 12 months (the missing 4 changes are more updates to the Armada tool).

SRPG is up to: 205 source files, 174 asset files (141 & 80 in June '19)

StrategyTech Plugin has: 135 source files, 2 asset files (162 & 0 in June '19)

CoreTech Plugin has: 38 source files, 2 asset files (18 & 0 in June in '19)

The big ticket items over the last year: A transaction system for exchanging one set of things for another (possibly even delayed by time). The entirely of the strategy game mode that acts as the meta game environment between the tactical ship missions. Did a whole lot with custom K2 Nodes, learning a lot and making the idea for writing “good” blueprint code not seem so far fetched. Frameworks for Tactical Mission Scripting and Tactical Map Generation.

Covid

As you can imagine, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has really shaken up my routine and how I can work on my project. I've been working from home for the past couple of weeks so I've really had to find a way to separate work-work from hobby-work which is tough when they so very similar. Previously I at least had a change of scenery and a commute to kind of break up the two things, but now I don't. For now I've had to settle on using different rooms for the different work, but even that doesn't quite work out all the time.

On the other hand it's been a positive for the amount of time that I have available to work on the game. Although Maryland is not on a lockdown like many other states, most things are closed and social gatherings are discouraged. This means that all the things that my girlfriend would like to go out and do or people she'd like to have over for dinner, she basically can't. Plus with all the things I'd usually like to go out and do just as shut down, there's a lot of time around the house and working on my project is a nice way to spend that time. I don't think I'll come out the other side of this event with a finished game or anything (depending on how long it lasts) but if the last two weeks are any indication I'll probably get more done than if there hadn't been a world-wide pandemic.

I've definitely have to keep a closer eye on potential for burnout, but at least working on a solo game project is more relaxing that trying to do it with a group. I could always bounce over to that Armada tool and work on it as well if I needed a change in domain.

Sprint Recap

Finish the “Investigate Signal” tactical script.

Upgrade to UE 4.24.

Non-instantaneous View transitions (which I call visualizations).

Sprint Results

I did finish the mission script. You can win if you destroy the asteroid, you fail if it reaches the station. It's definitely got a lot of potential, its main problem right now is balance. The HP relative to the amount of damage four ships can deal out isn't high enough but I wasn't expecting that to be quite right at the moment. I still didn't work on any new ship equipment that would support a non-combat victory, but it's been added to my backlog notes to get back around to.

Engine Upgrade. Check. Done. Finito.

The visualizations have gotten off to a pretty good start. I call them that because, as with many of my core systems, this one shares a lot of similarities with a system with a similar name at work. Not exactly, but similar. It's also an interesting exercise because instead of being in a position to port code (as I would be if this were if this were a work project) what I'm really doing it building it from first principles. But I have a better idea of what it should do and how it can accomplish it in the end than the system at work that's evolved over time to get where it is now. Plus there's all sorts of stuff that I just don't have to support for the foreseeable future that would unnecessarily complicate things for me.

Anyway, I've gotten a good framework in place for the visualizations. I also replaced the old visualization solution for individual ship movement with the new system. It's not particularly pretty (the ship just pops from one tile to the next) but that's an iteration problem for that particular asset, not a systemic problem like it was before.

I guess I'm also about to have the problem that things that I want to share may need video/gifs instead of static images.

April '20 Sprint Goals

Continue work on the support for visualizations. Primary use case will be the Forced movement at the end of the turn for ships that have remaining movement points left. This will requires a visualization that can invoke other visualizations in a latent fashion and wait for them (or not) to complete before moving on to the next thing.

Games

Fate Grand/Order

Runeterra - just a bit though. I'm not really sure what the continually hook is. I don't really care about climbing the ladder and trying to collect all the cards doesn't really seem like a motivating factor for me.

I think that tomorrow I'm going to start a game of Civ VI. I haven't played in a while, it'll be another good diversion from burnout and I'm on vacation anyway for the next few days.