KayLand

23 January 2025 This DevLog was started in December 2024 ( here is the original post ). Its purpose was to record my progress in creating "Aelinor" - a 3D, third-person puzzle game). At each stage of the development of the game, I used a spreadsheet to record in writing the steps I had taken in the development of the game, and I used screenshots to document how those steps affected the look of the game. In the spreadsheet I also noted my thoughts and feelings about how the project was going: In a separate sheet, I kept detailed notes of how I achieved each task. This is partly because I wanted to be able to replicate the steps again in other games if necessary. Another reason is that I hate watching video tutorials. I would much rather go through a written/illustrated tutorial, because then I can go at my own pace. If you skip through a video tutorial, you often miss crucial steps and instructions, so you have to watch the whole thing - and they are often up to an hour long. ...

22 January 2025 The very last item on my "Must Haves" checklist for this game was that I wanted to know how to create a piece of paper in the game, that had a clue/note in it for the player to read.  Having already learned how to apply a JPG image to a cube (when I applied the image of Aelinor onto a great big wall), I realised that I probably just needed to create a simple message in a drawing program (Linearity Curve, in this case), choose a suitable font to make it fit in with the genre of the game ("HanziPen SC" font), and then save it as a JPG format. I did that, then imported it into the Content Drawer of my current level in UE5. Just when I was about to apply the JPG to a small thin cube, I realised that I could select the 'Plane' shape instead, so I tried that.  That meant I had finished all of the "Must Have" items on my checklist for the development of the game.  THE END!

22 January 2025 (Continued) Having created a very pleasing outside of Aelinor, I needed to find a way to get the character inside it. I did a quick Google search and found a tutorial that looked like it might do what I wanted: " Build levels FAST with UE5's new Cube Grid tool " This showed me how to punch a hole in the wall object that showed the Aelinor JPG. The CubeGrid tool basically allows you to select cube-shaped chunks in the building materials of UE5, then move them or destroy them. In this case I didn't have much time so decided to just punch a crude hole through the door of Aelinor's structure: I'm not too pleased with the current effect, but at least it's a doorway that the character can walk through: Today I have also added a few trees to the landscape around Aelinor, to make it look more like a forest and less like a wall-with-a-JPG-image-stuck-to-it when the player is playing the game: I hadn't used the 'foliage' tool before in U...

22 January 2025 Another VERY good day, so far. Today I wanted to try to add an image of the outside of Aelinor itself to the game. (Aelinor is the cathedral-like structure made from merged, ancient soul trees.) This is the image that I created using DALL-E, right at the beginning of the project: If this project had been longer, I would have like to try creating Aeilinor itself as a 3D object, but because that was outside the scope of the project, I wanted to at least try to put this image on a big wall, to see how it looked in UE5. In the end I managed to do it just by trial and error. I imported a JPG file into the content drawer, then dragged it onto a big flat wall shape: When I tested it in Play mode, the effect was brilliant! Because everything is rendered in 2D on the screen, it actually looked like Aelinor was a great big structure that the character could approach.  This was my best moment of the whole project: The only problem was that the other side of the wall was identi...

21 January 2025 (Continued) Earlier I had got the game to a stage where if the character approached the red bottle, a message appeared saying, "Use this bottle?", and "Yes" and "No" buttons also appeared on the screen. BUT: 1) the player couldn't select either of the buttons because the mouse pointer didn't appear on the screen, and 2) even if the player had made a selection, nothing would happen, because I hadn't tied any actions to the Yes/No buttons.  After continuing to watch the  tutorial  video, I have at last been able to add some functionality to the buttons.  Now the player is able to choose between Yes and No. If they choose No, nothing happens yet. But if they choose Yes, they now get a message at the top left of the screen, saying "You Win!" I know this is very very basic functionality, but at least I can build up my knowledge and skills from here. The "You Win!" message is basically a placeholder for what I woul...

 21 January 2025 (Part 2) Yay - I've continued to watch the tutorial and now the cursor appears on the screen and the player can select either Yes or No. Nothing happens yet, of course, but I'm GETTING SOMEWHERE. Shame the game has to be finished tomorrow... Now if the character approaches the red bottle, a message appears saying "Use this bottle?". The player then has to choose between Yes and No. If they choose No, nothing happens. If they choose Yes, they get a message at the top left of the screen saying "You Win!" These two actions are just 'placeholder' steps, to prove to myself that the logic of the game is working. As far as I'm aware, it wasn't even necessary for the logic of the game to work for this Gateway Level 2 course, so I could have just left these as text boxes on a 'greybox' level. But instead I've introduced logic to the game so that the character can interact with other assets (coloured bottles, in this case)...

21 January 2025 Busy day. (Complete coincidence that the project is due to be submitted the day after tomorrow...) I've gone back to the tutorial I mentioned yesterday (" Making A Game in UE5 28: Giving Our Player A CHOICE!!! "), and have carried out the steps I skipped before. So now when I move the character near the red bottle, the red bottle glows red. (That's not what I'm actually aiming for, but I wasn't able to get the later steps to work without doing this first.) UPDATE:  Now I've continued to follow the tutorial and the red bottle still glows, but at least it now stops glowing when the character moves away from it.  NOTHER UPDATE:  At last! I've been able to get a message come up on the screen asking if the player would like to use this bottle*. ...but I can't do anything with it, because the cursor doesn't appear on the screen. *Note: I forgot to take a screenshot at the time, so the bottles are now on a giant bench instead of the de...

19 January 2025 I've been following a tutorial on You Tube (" Making A Game in UE5 28: Giving Our Player A CHOICE!!! "), but skipped a couple of steps, so now I need to go back and actually do the steps because I can't get the actions to work. Surprise.  But I'm hopting that by the end of the tutorial I should be able to give the character a choice between two options. I'm tired though, so I'll have to do the rest tomorrow.  In the meantime, I've at least learned a tiny bit about blueprints and event graphs. For me these are the fun bits of developing the game. They feel like I'm creating magic.  Having said that, they are extremely dull to look at:

18 January 2025 I've fixed the sky! Previously I accidentally changed it so it was purple (and somehow lumpy ), and now I've accidentally fixed it.  I've also fixed the rest of bottles' colours (for green, cyan, indigo & purple), so when the character picks up a bottle, it appears in the mannequin's hand as the correct colour instead of metallic or red, which is what it was doing before.  (Check out the lovely (un-lumpy) blue sky below, and the character successfully holding a purple bottle) That's all I dared do, today. I didn't want to do anything else in case I broke the game. 

15 January 2025 I've been floundering around in the guts of UE today, trying to find out how to change the colours of my bottles. I did manage to get the red bottle to successfully remain red when the character picked it up... ...but then all of the other bottles went red when I picked them up. It was very frustrating. I feel like changing the colour of an object should be really simple, and yet it seems to be a giant faff.  (Note also that the sky is still broken) UPDATE: I have finally managed to get three bottles to successfully appear as the correct colour when they're picked up (red, orange, and yellow. Screenshot is of orange bottle showing in the character's hand) I'm probably solving this problem the wrong way (or doing it inefficiently, at any rate), but at least the bottles are now doing what I want them to do. So I'm going to quit while I'm ahead, and stop working on the project before I break anything.  --- Remaining tasks for the project Must do: M...

11 January 2025 Another new bug:  Having quit yesterday because the game had unexpectedly broken itself, I came back to it prepared to attempt changing the colours/sizes of the bottles. However, then I discovered that when the character picked up any of the coloured bottles, they reverted to their original metallic look. (In the screenshot below, the character has picked up the green bottle, but when it disappears from the ground and reappears in the character's hand, it has turned back to just a plain metallic surface):

10 January 2025 For the gameplay, I wanted seven bottles of different colours. Once I'd found out how to pick up objects, I copied and pasted the basic metallic bottle until I had seven bottles that the character could pick up. I needed to change the colours of the 7 bottles, so I had to find a tutorial showing how to do it. I found " How To Change A Material/Texture Colour In Unreal Engine 4/5 (Tutorial) | How To Tint A Material " by Matt Aspland: Unfortunately it was an hour long, and I didn't want an hour's worth of tutorial - I just wanted to know how to change the colour of an object, and didn't think it should be that hard, so I started playing with the assets in my game I copied and pasted the bottle x7, then changed all of their colours: New bugs: When I clicked the 'Play' button, all of my finely crafted rainbow-coloured bottles spontaneously became massive. I hadn't done anything to them except change their colour, but for some reason th...

 10 January 2025 (As mentioned previously, this is part of my Dev Log for the Games Development course .) Wow - I am still watching the video from Gorka Games on " How to Make a Simple Pick Up System in Unreal Engine 5 - Beginner Tutorial ", and it's allowing me to add even more functionality to the game.  Today I have learned how to use 'sockets' with the blueprint character mannequin. It looks like sockets allow you to place an item in/on an appropriate area of the character's body/skeleton, and then make adjustments so that the character and object are interacting in a realistic way. In yesterday's post  I'd learned how to equip a character with an object, but the object's default size wasn't realistic when it was picked up. (Although it was fine when it was on the ground beforehand): But after following the rest of the YouTube tutorial today, I have now managed to get the picked-up object to be a sensible size when the character is holding ...

09 January 2025 (This forms part of the development log for the Games Development course that I'm doing at Barnsley College in 2025) Today was another good day. I continued to watch " How to Make a Simple Pick Up System in Unreal Engine 5 - Beginner Tutorial "  by Gorka Games, and learned how to equip a character. In other words, if the character gets within range to pick up one of the special items (a pill and a bottle at the moment, but in the final game it should be a selection of bottles), and they press 'E' on the keyboard, the object disappears from the ground and now appears in the character's hand.  Here is the evidence of the character now having picked up the bottle: The bottle is currently waaaaay too big, but that will hopefully be fixed tomorrow when I watch the next section of the tutorial. I'm just really chuffed to have achieved this at all, at the moment. I've spent weeks getting really frustrated about not knowing how to do things, a...

 08 January 2025 I spent at least half an hour yesterday trying to import a bottle shape from Fab and then importing it into my project. But at least I finally managed to do it, and I've written instructions for myself on how to do it again. So I now have a bottle in my game. (It's currently the wrong size, but I can change that.): Now I need to find out how to actually pick up the object... ----- ...By watching the Gorka Games tutorial "How to Make a Simple Pick Up System in Unreal Engine 5 - Beginner Tutorial" , I was able to follow along with the tutorial and eventually got it to work (on the second attempt). I learned how to create a 'collision box' around an asset on the screen (e.g. a bottle in this case), so that when the character comes within range of that box, specific actions can be triggered (like enabling the character to pick up the asset). Here is a screenshot now showing a bottle and a big white pill on the ground (highlighted in green).  If th...

 07 January 2025 Today started out OK, but then went horribly wrong. I managed to find out how to import objects and textures from the 'Fab' resource: I've no idea how I got onto a wireframe view, but here I am, and I don't know how to get back to the normal view. It's a shame as well, because I'd just created a little wooden shack and I was going to start putting some assets in it for the final project.  ...OK, now I've got the more familiar view back, but the layout of my screen has gone weird, because the normally-docked tabs (like 'Outline' and 'Landscape') have disappeared.  I think it's time to give up with this experiment, and start a new one. 

Breakthrough! I have been wondering for weeks how to align objects in UE, but was too busy learning other elements to find out how to do it. But at last I've gone back to my checklist spreadsheet and at the top was "Find out how to align objects".  A quick Google search and a YouTube video later, and I can now align objects properly with each other.  How to align objects in Unreal Engine (5.4) 1) Go into Modeling Mode (from the top left-ish dropdown) 2) Select 'XForm' (transform) from the icons down the left (on the screen it's in blue) 3) Click on two or more objects that you want to align with each other.  4) Click on 'Align' (underneath the 'Modeling Mode' dropdown)  5) Check which way you're oriented by looking at the little XYZ diagram near the bottom left of the image. That should help you understand what the computer thinks is front/back/left/right/up/down. 6) Use the different options to align your objects with each other. For exam...