Being a month into my own game development journey, it's so neat seeing what else people can make when they try. We never know what we can create if we don't try it.
Absolutely agree with this. I have been binging devlogs from other creators ever since I started my journey, and it is so inspiring to see what people are making.
06:38 You should cast to the player character once in beginplay and save it as a reference. Then when overlapping with an actor you should check if the overlapped actor is the same as your saved player reference. Your current method attempts to cast to the player any time the actor overlaps with any other actor, and will lead to unnecessarily heavy performance costs when in close proximity with a lot of other actors.
And if you at some point need to optimize overlaps even further, you could take advantage of collision profiles. For example a projectile would ignore every collision channel other than "Pawn" so it wouldnt cause overlaps with the environment and especially other projectiles. Though I definetly recommend doing that only if you notice performance hits in some specific area or with some mechanic. Its not worth doing everywhere as its something that will cause issues if you dont keep it in the back of your mind or if you missclick something.
Thank you for the awesome feedback and ideas. When you talk about the "begin play" part, you meam casting to the player from the event graph of the object and then turning that into a variable that I can use elsewhere inside the actor, correct? I've started doing that a lot more, especially with setting up a "dog treat" counter, lives and an HP bar. As for the collision profile, I had made one recently and am using it for my door boxes, definitely easy to forget about them, but I might utilize it more in the future as well.
@@ouvio Yeah, when the object is created, should cast to the player and save it as a reference. (You can use the "Get player pawn" node as the wildcard for the cast.) Then you can use the reference elsewhere in the actor and you dont have to cast to the player during gameplay. This reduces the overall amount of work the CPU has to do, but most importantly moves much of that work to the loading screen and away from gameplay moments; keeping the FPS high and smooth.
Waw I really liked the video. I also started my indie game and it is also a sidescroller, but in 3D since I have a background in 3D modeling. Looking forward to see more of your videos! It motivates me a lot. Thx
That's awesome to hear. I'll have to check it out. It really is something that motivates me as well, seeing other's indie devlogs and starting their journey, makes it super motivating to keep going :)
Hey there, not sure if anyone else has already asked but I was wondering why you don't use a fall duration or tie use y velocity for your fall animation With the method you're using now would it not slow your fall animation as you got close to the ground? You could instead use a fall duration float or your vertical velocity, and then set your fall animation speed to this number, that way the speed will increase as you fall faster or for longer, you can even clamp the number between 0 and 2 (I think you used 2 as your fast speed) so that you can't just fall for 100 seconds and get a crazy fall animation.. Please let me know if I'm being dumb lol, love your videos hope you keep it up! the main benifit of using some sort of incrementing number is that it will start low, and then increase over time, this makes sense since the longer you fall the faster your fall, the numbers go up as you go down ;) so it makes more sense to use a timer of some sort, as it looks right not if you jump from platform to platform, you instantly enter double speed falling, because of the gap between the platforms so thats one of the main reasons I would switch away from the raycast method..
To be honest, I hadn't even thought about this. Thank you so much for the suggestion. I'll definitely look into doing this over the line trace. I did the line trace partially because I've never done one before and wanted to know how it works, but now that I know, it makes a lot more sense to go with your suggestion. The gap inbetween platforms is definitely a big factor on why I don't like the way it currently works. Plus, from what I've heard line traces are adding a lot of to the computing time, making the game less performance friendly.
Those animations are so juicy, just wow dude. The mechanic where you can go perpendicular to mostly flat map reminds me one of my favourite childhood games: Tomba 2, very fun game!
Thank you for the kind words. I'm excited to expand on the set of cleaned up animations I have so far. Never heard of that game. I'll have to check it out.
I’m loving how the player art interacts with the cast shadows. I’m working on a 2.5D game too but using Spine with PaperZD. Might look into updating my materials to get that effect. Looking forward to future videos.
I honestly don't know if this is an art style that exists somewhere. If you're wondering if I looked up some references to try and design him in a specific direction, I didn't. What I did do though was to design the character with animation in mind. That meant, simpler shapes. The limbs for example are just sausage / tube shapes that are easily redrawn in whatever position needed. Come to think of it, while visually the character might not look like any specific show style, the thought process behind the design itself is definitely very common for 2D TV Animation
Love this, amazing to see 2d and 3d work together and the work with toonboom and unreal, its stuff I wanna learn myself , and its wonderful to get inspiration like this
super cool mate, just started following you. i like this style you have chosen! I've just started game dev, I'm learning the engines and programming too. look forward to seeing how you progress
You should use blender for blocking out the level because you will then have the suite free edit the 3d models. Set up unreal engine to auto import gl files.
This is amazing, the animations are stunning and the character design is delightful! Can I ask what size dimensions you created the character in, and if you adjusted any of the paper sprite/flipbook settings for your character once in unreal? I'm having an issue where my 2d character looks blurry, and I would love to know how you've been able to keep yours looking so crisp!
Hmmm blurry... does this happen when the character moves? That might be related to your project settings for anti aliasing. Fxaa is the one you want to go with, I believe. That said, I animated the character at 1920x1080, I think... or it might be 2560x1440. I'd have to check. The reasoning was that it is always better to scale down an image (a crisp image will only get crisper), instead of scaling up an image ( you can't automatically add more crispness, because even if you scale up the dpi in photoshop, the drawing ends up blurry )
I just stumbled across your previous devlog couple of hours ago and then you uploaded another one! Lucky me! If you think that rotating character and camera at 90 degrees is just to snappy and jaring, try creating level layout for 45 degree rotation, maybe that will suit the game better. Overall, this game looks really promising, I'm looking forward to see more!
I'm glad you found my small devlog and got a second episode to watch right away haha. The 45 degree suggestion is a good idea, I'll have to give that one a shot. The main issue with this system, at least the way I set it up right now, is that when the character exits the volume, he can't get back in, due to the volume ending at a certain distance to allow you to get out. I got some ideas though as to how to fix that.
When I look at your game it looks really good and it gives me an idea perhaps u can turn it into one of the early Assassin's Creed games but in 2D and u can include and platforming/parkour and fighting mechanics and that dog character could be a warrior with a hoodie and have cool weapons and stuff
Thank you for your suggestion. Assassins Creed is a property owned by Ubisoft, so I would be infringing on copyrights. Aside from that fact, my game and AC are two completely different types of games, set in different worlds that do not match. My game's world and story is my own and what you are suggesting is for me to throw out everything I intend to do, in order to make a fanfic AC game. While I appreciate your suggestions, this is most definitely not going to happen, and if you are looking for an Assasins Creed game, I suggest you keep searching.
Sometimes youtube throws you random videos. This happened to be something that I'm currently interested in. I am so glad RU-vid sent me this video! You have something great here! Can't wait to see where this goes. Love your art! Got yourself a sub, brotha! Also, what did you use to create and animate your character?
Well, I appreciate you sharing that. It's nice to know RU-vid is actually recommending my videos. Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate that and am glad that you like what I am making. Thank you for the sub :) The initial character design doodle was in Procreate on iPad. At first, I tried to animate the character in Adobe Animate, but that software is so badly optimized that I switched to Toon Boom Harmony, which let's me use textured lines without a hit to software performance.
I've been wondering, is it better to use Trello or Milanote for making boards? Both are really good, I've used both. But Trello is more text heavy than Milanote but has less limits too. Have you tried Milanote? I recently decided to use it for my animations. Haven't gotten a chance to really dive deep into it but I wanted to ask your opinion on it
I actually switched to Milanote as well. Dedicated a chunk of the upcoming episode to talking about it. I find Milanote works better for how I like to organize myself. Both are good tools, though. What do mean with Trello having less limits?
@@ouvio Another question, is it possible for me to publish/ upload my games on all stores and game websites? Or once it is on a store it wouldn't be allowed on a website?
