For any developer there is a wealth of options out there for out-of-the-box solutions. In the triple-I spheres the choice seems to be Unity or Unreal and both certainly have their detractors and supporters. Personally, I chose Unreal because it gels with me and I like BluePrint visual scripting. It may not be the right … Continue reading Working in Unreal Engine
Category: Blueprints
Books
I am a personal fan of books in adventure games as a way to offer extra information in a way that is entirely optional to the player. It is a cheap but effective way to populate the world with extra information, back story, whatever you wish. And in this case I also use books to … Continue reading Books
Dialogs
One element of the old-style RPGs we all know and love, and that persist in video games to this day, are the dialog boxes where the text appears letter by letter. Why these exist exactly is not clear. If you think about it they don't make that much sense. But they are part of video … Continue reading Dialogs
Blueprints: In-game messaging
Aside from character dialogues Piczle Cross Adventure also features some basic in-game messaging. In Piczle Colors some information was broadcast to the player through a fake Twitter-style social media post pop-up. When the player reached a milestone, unlocked a level, earned a trophy or anything like that, one of the game's characters would "tweet" at … Continue reading Blueprints: In-game messaging
Blueprints: Score-chan actor
A little technical blog post this week, as I talk through the creation of the Score-chan Actor BluePrint in Unreal Engine 4. Paper2D functionality in UE4 is not officially supported anymore and has a couple of quirks. However the Sprite and Flipbook Actor Blueprint classes are very useful and contain everything you need to quickly … Continue reading Blueprints: Score-chan actor
Custom themes
One of the strengths of working with data-driven systems is that it's very easy to tweak little things. For example, every aspect of the puzzle screen is easily modifiable. The colour of the grid, the type of cursor, the background, everything is tweakable with a parameter. Part of this can be found in the gameplay … Continue reading Custom themes
Faking it
However fine an engine Unreal Engine 4 is and however great its tools and visual scripting, there are definitely a few areas it doesn't quite measure up. One of those things is its not-supported-really-but-kinda-in-there Paper2D component, which Piczle Cross Adventure relies on quite heavily. Now of course I could (and perhaps should) be called foolhardy … Continue reading Faking it
