Framework Almost There…

I’ve been spending all of my time with Blueprints work and I have some pretty great things incorporated. Thank goodness there’s just a sea of tutorials out there! Back when I was trying (keyword here is trying) to code for the original Out Of Hell there weren’t as many thorough tutorials with Uscript (that I could find anyway) From what little I was able to grasp, I ended up just butchering the available code; cutting out what I didn’t need, adding pieces here and there until it was just a giant mishmash of hacky Frankenstein code! At one point, the error log was something ridiculous like 12 or 20 megabytes or something! That’s a HUGE text file!

Anyway, with the amount of tutorials out there I’m able to put together much cleaner code without warnings or errors and learn a little more along the way! My grasp of Blueprints is still novice-level at best but hey, it’s better than not knowing anything at all! And I actually forgot how much fun working on the coding side of things was and it’s sooooo gratifying when you get something to work the way you wanted it to. And as I said in a previous post, I now know what all goes into the code because I’m doing it, I’ve made notes in the Blueprints along the way and so if some bug appears later I may have an easier time tracking it down.

I gotta say though that with the amount of new, quality Frameworks appearing in the Marketplace I’ve had to fight the temptation to just fork over 20-40 bucks or so and just buy something pre-made. Who knows, maybe I will give in to that temptation if something just isn’t working out for me in the future but at the moment, what I have serves as a good base.

I just finished up the Inventory System earlier today and will soon be working on Monster AI and Weaponry. I’ve found that as an Artist I have to constantly resist the urge to make things “Pretty” first. If this were me a few years ago I’d have the Title Screen, Options Screen, HUD Graphics etc. all looking as slick as possible BEFORE even delving into how to make them work! This time, there are only ugly placeholder graphics everywhere but the game is functional at least! I’ll go back later and beautify it, which is the way it should be imho.

Thanks for dropping by and I’ll leave you with a screen of the first level you’ll be playing through in the final version of Out Of Hell! Doesn’t that make you just salivate?! ;p

PREPARE TO PAY 79.99 FOR THIS!!!!!!!

EDIT: So I decided to revisit some of the old features and spice them up a bit. Interaction was originally a lot like it was in OoH 2009 where as you approach an item, door or note that you could interact with, there would be a small indicator hovering over it that said “TAKE, READ, PUSH” etc. I’ve now changed it so that if you looked at something and it could be interacted with, an outline would appear and a crosshair icon would also appear (eventually this would be an icon of a hand or something) I realize it’s redundant to have both a crosshair icon AND an outline so which of the two would you prefer? I basically added both because it was mostly practice to see if I could.

You’ll also notice that there’s a blue and red bar representing stamina and health. These graphics are just placeholders for me to test if certain things are working. In the end, there will be no stamina bar or health indicator. I’m trying to do things a little differently and so when the player is low on stamina, they’ll obviously move slower and have to rely on audio cues (heavy panting ==> light breathing  ==> no sound)

I came up with a unique (I can’t remember any other games doing this) method for health and damage but I’ll keep that close to the chest for the time being. I promise it will be enough to always keep you on your toes when facing a single monster or a mob of monsters! Anyway, back to cleaning some of this shit up (look at that tangled mess of spaghetti in the third picture!)