Update April – Gameplay Change

It’s been awhile since last post. It’s really slow progress. At that time, I playtested with my fellow devs. Got some insightful idea. This is my game look like at the last update.

View post on imgur.com

Here are some updates I made since last post.

First skin

This game will contain some skins. At the beginning of the game, you only get 1 or 2 skins. You will get more  unlockable skins as you play. Since my artist friend can’t help me right now and I’m only designer wannabe programmer, I designed really simple & minimalist first skin.

I use orthographic camera with certain rotation setting, to show 2d gameplay but still maintain 3d feeling.

Tetris-like block

I made drastic change on the right side of panel. At the last update, right panel looked like a queue track. My friend told me, right panel was confusing him. He suggested to make it like tetris stack.

No more shifting buttons

At the last update, you’ll notice some purple buttons surrounding left panel. I decided to get rid all of them. To shifting boxes, you can drag with right button mouse.

Blocks appearance

Before i stick with current block design, this is how typical blocks looked like.

The problem arise when 2 blocks with same color is stacking.


You can’t tell what this stacking block consist of. Is that 2 blocks? Or just 1 block?

I made several alternative designs to solve this problem.

None of these are good enough or, I’m just bad designer. So I use this good old simple tetris design.

Yay!!

That’s it for today update. I hope I can post update more often.

Reading text file in Unreal Engine 4

Something that really bug me is inability of ue4 to handle or read simple text file. Yes, you still can do this. But, what if I want to do is just put simple file text and read that as a string. You can do that in C++ using

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will create text file reader as a actor component. We need a method to read file that will be called from blueprint.

Create class actor component

Name it “TextReaderComponent”.

Put this code in your header & implementation files.

UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable) FString ReadFile(FString filename); 
FString UTextReaderComponent::ReadFile(FString filename)
{
	//Read file ini [project]/Content/Data/ 
        //you can change with other location
	FString directory = FPaths::Combine(FPaths::GameContentDir(), "Data");
	FString result;
	IPlatformFile& file = FPlatformFileManager::Get().GetPlatformFile();
	if (file.CreateDirectory(*directory)) {
		FString myFile = directory + "/" + filename;
		FFileHelper::LoadFileToString(result, *myFile);
	}
	return result;
}

Compile!

Compile in both Editor & Visual Studio.

Testing.

Create text file in Content/Data/file.txt. Fill it with whatever text you want. Add Component “Text Reader” in your actor. Drag component to Event Graph. Now you can read simple text file.

Day 13 Codename warehouse

Intro

Hi, this is my first devlog post. According to git log, it’s been 13 days I’m developing this game. It doesn’t have title yet. Let’s just call it “Warehouse”.

View post on imgur.com

As you can see in the gif, there are 2 area. On the right, we have moving blocks. On the left, we have boxes with 4 colors (green, yellow, blue, red).

Gameplay

Basically, you have to destroy block on the right using available boxes in the left. To destroy the block, you have to match block pattern & color with box on the left. Use purple boxes to shift boxes horizontally or vertically. Then, if you found the right pattern & color, just drag your mouse to make pattern. Poff!! Block on the right will disappear.

Future Plan

This is just a beginning. Still far from finish. I hope this doesn’t not take more than 3 months. I want to release it in Steam and maybe mobile.

 

NB: The main reason I post this devlog is I want to improve my English writing. I hope I will write more frequently.