Week 2 - Planning and Reflection

Planning - What tasks am I doing? How will I approach them?

We have been asked to complete 5 tasks for this module, and have been given some examples of what we can do for them. Out of this list, I have decided to do the following:

• A main menu system using only 3D, diegetic/in-world components
•  An interactive and animated button and lever interaction system
• An interactive door system
•  An in-game painting tool where the player can pick up a brush and paint onto a canvas
•   A small domestic room in which some of the furniture can be re-textured in game

I've decided on these tasks as they are all related, which would make the experience easier to design due to how these concepts blend together. I've decided that all the tasks will take place in an artists studio or a workshop, with a futuristic or steampunk theming.  Each task will be a part of the greater overall experience, with some interacting directly with one another, instead of being isolated events. I believe this will challenge me as I will have to design the environment so that everything feels natural and intuitive.  I should design this experience with the mindset that the player should know what to do when they first begin the experience, with few hints other than some visual aides like symbols or demonstrations.

Reflection - Year 1

In year 1, each of the tasks I created were fairly isolated, so I would end up focusing too much on one aspect of the project at times, in an attempt to implement each of them the best I could with my level of experience. This would sacrifice the quality of the other tasks in turn. It also hindered my ability to limit the scope of the project, as I would attempt to make each individual task more substantial to compensate for their simplicity in isolation. However, this approach to the overall coursework did teach me a lot about how to design individual aspects of an experience well, so I can use those same skills to create polished mechanics in a much more interactive environment.

C++ - Why do I want to learn it?

This year, I intend to broaden my skillset by learning C++. My goal for this is to be able to better implement systems that the blueprint system in Unreal may not be suited for. Given my previous experience with Unreal, I do not feel entirely confident with implementing all the mechanics that will be present in the final project with just the blueprint system, as I still don't understand what all the nodes do, due to the nature of the system being that it obfuscates how exactly each node achieves what they do to simplify the process. Because of this, I found myself struggling to understand how my blueprints work, or how exactly some of them work with one another.