Terminal Retrospective

If you haven’t read the project post for Terminal before reading this, please do so here!

Project Goals

Returning to this project, I had pretty big indicators on what to improve. Mainly on the animation and AI front.

As a base, I initially had a COD Zombies-like experience comprised with the following components:

1. Constructed Level
2. Basic AI Components
   • Zombie Behaviour Tree
   • Basic Tasks and Services
3. Basic Animation Components
   • Blendspaces
   • Basic Animation BP

Upon revisit, I thought it would be a fun technical challenge to deviate from a the basic COD AI and build out more interesting behaviours. As a result, I scrapped the AI and animation components, opting to re-implement them in C++ and improve them with other techniques.

Here are some nifty systems I wanted to learn coming into this project:

1. Environment Query System

   Unreal’s EQS lets you query the environment for data, such as locations. I initially discovered this technique trying to implement a wall climber (that’s for another time), and thought it would be perfect for building out behaviours such as hiding and strafing due to its useful filtering and scoring systems.

2. Animation BP

   Animation blueprinting was a pretty big weakness in my skills and something I wanted to understand better. As a result, I took the time to learn how the Event Graph, Anim Graph and State Machines tied together. Oh and Blendspaces.

3. Layered Animations

   The initial project has pretty rigid animations. When attacking, for example, the enemy would stand still and perform the full-body animation. This set a limitation on it’s behaviour, as the lack of blending meant the running animation would stop when attacking mid-movement. I figured using layered animations would open up some possibilities in my behaviour tree development.

What Went Well

1. Assets

   Having much of the asset work and decisions done previous streamlined the development a tremendous amount.

2. Learning Goals

   I am much more comfortable with Animation Blueprints and more complex animation techniques such as Layered Animation. This was initially a pretty big weakness of mine, so I am pretty proud. I also learned how to knit Unreal’s EQS with behaviour trees to create some awesome behaviours.

3. Playtesting

   I brought in some friends in to playtest and got some awesome feedback. One notable adjustment is that I added a tooltip to guide the player to find and pick up the gun at the start.

4. Asset File Structure

   The initial folder structure for the assets was a hell-zone. I re-organised a lot of the content according to the UE5 Style Guide

What Didn’t

1. Script File Structure

   I admittedly did not know you could organise CPP files into subfolders until I saw it in a video. It is embarrassing but it will be a cathartic experience organising my next projects.

2. Damage Feedback

   I got feedback that the response from hitting enemies was non-existent. I added a hit sound-effect to try alleviate this, which helped but I also wanted to implement an additive damaged animation. I was unfortunately unable to do this in time. Additive animations will probably go into my bucket list for things I want to include into a project.

3. Use of check() and ensure()

   When looking through resources, I found some interesting code I wasn’t really familiar with — check(). It can be a an alternative to using the if() statement to check if things are null, when != nullptr is assumed to be always true.