Category: Unreal Engine 4

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

Piczle Colors post-mortem

Something slightly different for this week's devblog, but that has a bearing on the development of Piczle Cross Adventure nonetheless: I thought I'd look back on the development of Piczle Colors and write down some of the lessons learned and observations made. Piczle Colors is currently available from the Nintendo Switch eShop world-wide and as … Continue reading Piczle Colors post-mortem

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