I’d like to provide some feedback for the onboarding process for character development and tell you guys what the experience was like for me on my first day of creating a character.
A bit of background on myself - I have a BS in CompSci and currently have 9+ years of experience in full stack development. I have spent a lot of that time working with finnicky systems that often need a creative mind to find workarounds for suboptimal feature implementations. In my free time, I often do not program but I have created and published a character in the Rivals 1 engine, and I also have an ongoing Godot solo gamedev project that focuses heavily on moddability through a sandboxed Lua interpreter.
I have never touched an Unreal Engine devkit prior to today, and I also have virtually zero experience in modelling and animation.
TL;DR - After about 12 hours of progress, I was able to create my own copy of the Armando example mod, separate all the references to the original mod ID and replace them with my own, create an extremely simple model of a projectile, and modify Armando’s NSpecial to use this model and have altered attack data.
TL;DR critical feedback - Somehow, there needs to be a way to know what went wrong when the editor crashes. I couldn’t find any crash logs. Users cannot be expected to fix a problem when they aren’t told what the problem is.
Also, the instructions for quickly playtesting by modifying the Editor Preferences weren’t working for me.
My first steps were to follow the guide up to page 9 (just before setting up Blender for Unreal), and then realized I’d need a model. I ended up spending a few hours copying over what I thought was just the essential files from Armando since I wanted to preserve the files that were created when creating a new workshop item. After an embarrasing amount of time, I eventually I realized it would be easier to just replace everything with the Armando files and just bring in stuff from my workshop item instead. It took about an hour and a half to locate all the places where the mod ID was referencing Armando instead of my own mod, as well as rename files using the bulk renaming tool.
Next, I spent a good deal of time in Blender creating a super basic rectangle with attached bones. It took a long time and help from a couple friends to get there since the Blender interface is not very intuitive (not that you guys can help it 😃). I used a bit of trial and error to get through the export process and learned how to get the Unreal import warnings to stop.
After that, I slowly worked through swapping out references to Armando’s ArmShot in favor of my new “barrier” rectangle. I wanted to create an attack that shot out a barrier that repelled enemies while it was moving, and then came to rest. I wanted it to be solid as well, which was a step that came pretty much last. I frequently consulted the guide for learning about how the various systems and components interacted with each other. I had quite a few issues with hitboxes here since I wanted it to interpolate between a Top bone and a Bottom bone, but I couldn’t know if it was working since hitbox visualization kept crashing the editor every time my article spawned. I spent a lot of time re-launching the game through the editor; the part of the guide that tells you how to quickly playtest by modifying the Editor Preferences weren’t working for me. I still don’t know if the positions are exactly how I’d like them, but I’ve attached the end result of today’s progress.
Feedback for the guide:
Armando template feedback:
All in all, even though I did get hung up at a few spots while reading the guide, I was familiar enough with other gamedev engines that a lot of things clicked quickly. Sometimes, the editor would crash and I wouldn’t know why. Once, it was because the mesh for an article didn’t have an assigned material. But the only hint that I had was that it crashed whenever that article spawned. Better logs and feedback would have sped up the diagnosis process a ton. I still don’t know why the hitbox visualization is broken, or if there is something I can do about it.
Looking forward to future updates - and thanks for reading :)