Postmortem

Postmortem 

How did the Jam go?

I feel like it went well considering it was my first time. Working solo certainly invited alot of challenges and greatly limited what I could do for the project, however, I was going into it expecting to lose. This was also the first time I tried working in Unreal Engine with a full scale project. Despite this, I managed to get a game ready and uploaded by the deadline. 

How much time did you spend on it?

I wasn’t keeping track of the exact hour count, but I spent most of my time throughout the week entirely on this project (even left work early to work on it). Generally, if I wasn’t in class or at work, I was working on my project.

What part of ‘making a game’ do you need the most help with?

As of right now, I feel like I’m lacking on the artistic side of game design. I want to focus more on creating characters/props and animating them for the games I make. Additionally, my levels are kinda bland (primarily because I ran out of time). I’d like to make more meaningful level layouts too. However, from a more technical standpoint, I do want to learn more about traditional C++ coding rather than working in Blueprint. I prefer to do written code over visual scripting. Above all, I would like to make much better AI for my games. I spent most of my time working on my really simple AI that could do the following:

-Sense the player through sight and sound

-Remember where they last saw the player, and investigate the area

-Catch the player and start a game over sequence

-Get distracted by other sounds (like when the player throws a rock near them)

-Randomly patrol an area until conditions are met.

-Return to random patrol when conditions are not met.

However, the memory was really buggy and would cause the AI to jitter slowly toward the player. And there were also times when the AI would just randomly turn around and walk away from the player as if they suddenly forgot they were standing right in front of them (which was pretty entertaining to watch at times). 

Link: https://itch.io/jam/2022-epic-megajam/rate/1687319