Welcome back to another Corporeality weekly update!
This week has been surprisingly fruitful for us in continuing to learn how to use Unreal Engine.
Since last week, we’ve managed to debug and resolve the lighting issues we were seeing!
It turns out that the orthographic camera in Unreal has actually been broken since at least 2014–at least, that’s as far back as we traced the issue to. Point lights don’t seem to play nicely with ortho cameras, so we’ve had to switch to a perspective camera for what we want to do.
In terems of actual gameplay, we’ve made strides of progress here. We now have logic allowing us to spawn new balls attached to the paddle, as well as launch them all off the paddle as soon as the player clicks the left mouse button.
We now support an arbitrary number of balls, each with an arbitrary number of lives (it’ll respawn on the paddle if it hasn’t yet run out of lives), and the paddle itself has a number of lives before the game automatically closes.
It was actually a lot of work to get this to work fully, bearing in mind that balls must always lose their lives, but the player must only lose a life if there are no balls remaining in play.
We now have some additional learning to do with Unreal, as we don’t fully understand the relationship model between player controller, pawn, game mode, level, and HUD yet. Our goal is to try and display information like the remaining lives of the player, but we don’t yet have enough knowledge to make this work, so this is our immediate goal for the future. We’re of course also planning to continue to add required functionality and game mechanics as we go along.
For now, though, please enjoy these two interesting demo videos!
Thanks for continuing to stick with us on our adventure, and, until next time, kveðja!