Gigus Games

 Hello again! This week I'm here to talk to you about Navigation Meshes.  My story begins with the creation of our worshipers, little minions that are going to be the source of your power (and your tower's power).  I created these little guys so that they'll follow you around - only problem is that at first, they didn't. The first time I spawned my little stone golem minion, I thought I could control it with a simple velocity call.  I was completely wrong!  It needs the MoveToLocation() function AND a navmesh. I learned the hard way because our original navmesh looked kind of like this -  and the worshipers still didn't move.  I had to dive deep into the workings of the navmesh and discovered another use for the NavMesh Modifier Volume.  Up until now, we were using them to limit the navmesh.  I discovered that you can use them to add weight to various sections of a navmesh in order to persuade the AI to take those paths instead!  Our new...

 Guilherme Silva After numerous attempts, I finally grasped Behavior Trees. Through trial and error, I managed to make my character attack the enemy; a breakthrough moment indeed. However, amidst this progress, I encountered a crash that not only corrupted my blueprint but also rendered my UE5 project incompatible with the behavior tree. It took the entirety of the next day to transfer my files to my laptop and bring them to campus, where miraculously, they worked without any alterations. After reinstalling my project, everything seemed to fall back into place. Now, with his updated behavior tree I can start making his brothers!

 Hello everyone! This week my biggest struggle came from my interaction system that I had implemented earlier in the week.  When I first put it in, I only had the nexus that the player could interact with and it was working great! The nexus would light up when the player could interact with it. Once I tried to implement the same component into the buildable towers, that's when weird things started to occur.  Every time I would get in range to interact with a tower, the game would crash and I couldn't understand what was going on. It didn't make sense to me how I was getting an access violation from code that worked with the nexus.  I decided to investigate by using breakpoints within Visual Studio, and what I found was even more confusing.   After adding the InteractableHit to the FocusedObjects TArray, when trying to call OnFocus() the 'this' object became NULL!  I had no idea what was going on.  I decided to look at the OnFocus() function that I...

This week my biggest problem came from Perforce.  I was in charge of pushing many assets to the project and it took a little while to get in the groove of how to do it effectively.  Many times I would submit an update and my teammate's game would either not build or crash after being run.  Each time this happened, we spent at least an hour trying to figure out what was causing it and why it wasn't doing the same on my end.  It was very frustrating! I discovered that if I am not connected to Revision Control in Unreal Engine when creating new C++ classes or Blueprints that it won't automatically add it to depot in Perforce.  I've gotten the hang of double checking my submits to make sure every file that I worked on is in there.  Many of our issues were caused by a blueprint or an asset not being pushed to the depot.  It wouldn't cause an issue on my machine because the files were inside of the workspace, but my teammate would crash or not build.  A...

This week, my objective was to craft a turret for my Tower Defense project. Little did I anticipate the labyrinth of challenges that awaited me. What initially seemed like a straightforward task to complete within a span of eight hours turned into a series of sleepless nights. I embarked on the journey with the intention of coding just a few simple lines to grant my Tower the ability to swiftly detect and engage enemies. Yet, as I delved deeper, attempting to imbue it with manual functionalities, I encountered an unexpected hurdle. Upon converting the code into a blueprint and integrating it with the model, my creation failed to perform as intended, resembling nothing more than a stoic golem staring blankly back at me.      It was only through the guidance of a classmate that I stumbled upon the concept of Behavior Trees, leading to a pivotal realization: my AI lacked the rationale to maneuver or retaliate against adversaries, with its detection mechanisms sorely outdated...

Introducing our new project! In Spellbound Sentinels, take control of a spellcaster to fend off hordes of enemies trying to destroy your source of power.  This third-person tower defense game allows you to summon towers, power them with followers, and cast spells to stop waves of enemies in their tracks.  Do you have what it takes to protect what gives you strength? Here's a first-look at our build!