juliehuang

the last 3 days – Julie

Tues 6/1/21: today was spent figuring out more of my interactable car tutorial! I’m starting to have a way better understanding of how the code and nodes work. I realized that if I hold down right-click while dragging across my screen, I can move around my code! If only I had discovered this sooner – would’ve saved a ton of time. Today, I worked on the car’s controls and how to get the passenger to enter the car.

Wed 6/2/21: Because I felt like seeing what else I could do, I started looking up tutorials for audio visualizers! An audio visualizer is basically a visualization (hence the name) of the beats or rhythm to music. This can come in the form of dancing cubes, a particle wave, bouncing spheres, and more. I didn’t end up finding a tutorial I liked and worked on my interactable car more. Right now, the passenger can enter and exit the car if the user presses the E key and the car can drive. The passenger has yet to drive the actual car.

Thurs 6/3/21: so my avatar/passenger disappeared! Yay! Well to clarify, it disappears when it enters the car and begins to drive. As well as this, after leaving the car, the passenger would fall through the floor of the scene. After tracing back in the tutorial I used and triple-checking all of my code, I asked the awesome Mr. Polge for help. After a while of him and I checking my code yet again and changing a bunch of small things to test out what could’ve been going wrong, we came to a temporary solution. We got it so that the car would still drive from the player’s POV, but the passenger wouldn’t be seen until they exited the car. Also, the passenger stopped falling through the floor.

I have fallen and I can’t get up (day 5 – Julie)

As the title suggests, I have fallen.

dun dun duuuunnn

Okay, that sounds bad. I really just fell off the platform that I placed in my game and could not get back to it so I just descended into nothingness. I tried everything I could to get back on top of it but it was nowhere to be found (if I remember to, I’ll edit this post later and include screenshots of the void). Even after searching and nitpicking around in the settings, I just could not find a way to get back to the platform. I then asked Mr. Polge for assistance but we just could not find our way back up. Consequently, I decided to start over and make a new game. I decided to try to make an interactable car! This means I’d have a third-person perspective character driving a car around the game. Not entirely sure how I’d turn this into a game, but for now, I’m working on getting the car to drive and editing all the physics of the car.

Progress!!!

Level 1 (day 4 – Julie)

Today was pretty chill, I just worked on my Jelly Shooter game more. I followed this one tutorial from YouTube for an first-person shooter game, except put my own little twist on it for fun. I began with an empty level template so it could act as a “blank canvas” of sorts (essentially, you start out with nothing and you’re floating in a void of nothingness). Today, I added in and coded my poisonous jellies that would chase my character. I also added in a platform/floor for everything to be on and added some lighting so things wouldn’t be too dark. I’m definitely not used to the controls yet, as there’s a learning curve and it’s not an easy one to learn. I’ve lost some bits of code and objects in my game by accident simply because I couldn’t navigate to them (whoopsie).

YouTube is saving me right now (day 3 – Julie)

I have finally decided that I’m going to make a first-person shooter game! It’ll basically be a game where you shoot a bunch of poisonous jelly cubes and the more jellies you shoot, the more ammo you will have (still need to work out other logistics of course but that’s the basic idea I have so far). I’m currently following up with a few tutorials to get a better understanding of how Unreal Engine works, what is feasible for me to create, and to develop my game. As the title states, YouTube has been an extremely helpful resource for achieving my learning goals. A fun thing that I discovered today is that the charger for the laptop I’m using that has Unreal Engine downloaded no longer works whenever I want it to! So for the first part of the day, I couldn’t edit much of my game at all. But eventually, I figured out that it works at a very specific angle and I’ll have to just deal until the new charger I ordered gets here (hopefully Amazon prime pulls through!)

(some screenshots of two of the tutorials I’m using/have watched)

Julie’s first day on the job :)

Today consisted mainly of a captivating introduction to EpicGames, Unreal Engine (the game they use), what goes into creating game engines and designing characters and sets (long-story short: billions of tiny triangular pixels arranged with the help of programs coded to determine how the light sources would hit different parts of the scene), and plans for the next two weeks. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Polge, a senior programmer at EpicGames (and an all-around awesome individual). One really cool part of my day was playing around with Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman creator. Basically, this application allows you to design your own eerily-realistic-looking avatars by contouring facial features, adjusting a ton of settings, and choosing different body parts and details. Each metahuman is creepily realistic, and it’s very easy to adjust settings and features to indicate different genders and/or ethnicities. The featured photo is an example of these metahumans (totally looks like a real person. It’s astounding how advanced and high-quality game graphics are). I’d say this has been a pretty solid first day.