BA2A - Week 2

Week 2 Summary

Prototype Ideas

The focus of the game is the Survival aspect. The greatest dangers of the game will be the cold environment and starvation. Throughout the creation of the game I will be adding more dangers such as wolfs, frozen lakes (Player goes through the ice), bandits?, etc. It all depends on how much work lies behind it all.

The creation of the game will be taken in steps. I will start off very basic by creating a working inventory system, from there I will create various pickup items such as Food, Water, Wood, etc. After that is done I will start making the world using world generator and create a very simple snowy forest environment. In the beginning the game will have a lot of fog around the player so the view distance is very short and thus it doesn’t need to be the best looking game to start off with.

Another thing with the game is that I want a very minimalistic UI, preferably the screen should be completely empty from UI if you don’t have your inventory open.

An idea I have for navigation is that the player will leave footprints after himself. So if the player get’s lost he can by the help of following his old footprints go back to areas he have already explored. This might be a bit unrealistic if it is currently snowing at his area but it would be a nice game feature for the player to be able to backtrack. A map I believe would be a bit too advanced to include, I will explore more options for this. 

When it comes to the story/setting I have yet to decide but I am currently thinking about reasons why the player is stranded up there. It feels like if he's stuck up there due to a plane crash it's a bit too cliché.

Creating the Inventory System

The first feature I wanted to implement into my game was the inventory system, since this is one of the most important features of my game I wanted to make sure I got this right. I found this really good and in-depth tutorial created by Epic Games themselves! It was 9 parts long but showed me step by step of the process! 

Link to tutorial series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4tltrLLVuQ&index=1&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gZalvQWYs8sc7RP_-8eSr3i

The way I approached this was to first follow the tutorial step by step and to later modify it into my own liking. For instance the tutorial version have Health, Energy and Mood which have replaced with "Health, Hunger and Temperature". The good this with this particular tutorial was that it showed you a very customizable way of doing a inventory system. If I want to add new items into the game all I have to is to copy another objects blueprint and change the values.

Inventory system working ingame