Space Pigeon was the first game I made in Unreal Engine 5 with a group of people. This was made for the Platformer prompt we were given for this Game Jam. Making this I had to take more of a lead programmer role, where I worked on the menu, character movements, enemy movements and level changes. I enjoyed this project as I was able to code what would be the fundamentals for a lot of games and so I'd be able to use what I'd learnt a lot in future projects.

Blueprint Programming

In this project, I worked primarily with blueprints. One thing I made sure to do was use comments to label all the different sections. This improved my blueprints' readability and makes it easier for other programmers to quickly know what it does. As well as this, I made sure to use, I used custom events because it keeps the code a lot neater and can help to simplify the wire network of the graph. (Epic Games, n.d.)

One frustrating part of this project was the enemy AIs. They were very simple, they simply had to move from left to right on platforms and once hit the game would end. But I came across many issues, such as them walking off platforms or not walking far enough. To fix this within the time constrains of the game jam, I placed objects to stop them from walking off because as long as there was an object in there line of view they would stop as intended. So in future, I would like to work on my implementation of enemy AI movements. For example, one thing I should have done is to create a base class for the enemy AI movements, then I could have the different distance of AI movements as different child classes to that one parent class. This would have been very easy to implement too as the movement speed is set by a variable that could be different for each class.

Bibliography

Epic Games. (n.d.). Custom Events. Unreal Engine. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/ProgrammingAndScripting/Blueprints/UserGuide/Events/Custom/#:~:text=Custom%20Events%20provide%20you%20with,wire%20network%20of%20your%20graph.