About The Side Project I'm Working On

Apart from the stuff I'm doing in class, a group of classmates and I have been trying to put together a 2D sidescroller adventure game, titled Nordic Sol, using the Construct2 engine. Here is an overview of the background story from our Facebook page: 

"The game is set in the magical world of Midwind. Midwind is a place that consists of floating islands. Each floating island is home to different races of creatures and kingdoms. The world is run through a caste system, the higher the island the higher status that kingdom is. The Sun being at the top is the ruling kingdom.Proud Norseman Mauritze is a warrior of a mighty Swedish tribe. One day Mauritz is wronged by the very deity they worship, Sunna, goddess of the Sun. Sun- burnt beyond repair and shunned by his whole village, the warrior vows vengeance. Mauritz’s goal: build his way to the Sun and let loose all Ragnarök."

 I am the lead for the coding team, as glorious as that sounds there are only 3 people on the code team at the moment. So far I have compiled some of the code and visual assets into the working build of the game. Some of the things I've completed are:

• Main menu navigation to all the pages. I'm still waiting on some more graphics for a couple of the pages, and we don't have any options at the moment since we are trying to get the game working first.
• A pause menu with very basic functionality. It's pretty ugly, but functional.
• An in-game shop which will allow you to buy health and stamina, as well as upgrade your sword, bow, and armor. I still need to update the graphic for it from the placeholder images.
• A HUD system with a health and stamina bar that function. It also shows current number of lives, gold, and weapon levels.
• Basic functionality for charging a shot on the bow, complete with a bar above the character to show how charged the shot is. Once it is fully charged it will shoot a different arrow that will do more damage.
• A life system where the first time you enter a level your stats are stored as a reference. If you die while you still have lives left, you will keep your current stats. If you run out of lives your stats will revert back to the stored stats.
• The weapon selection feature, so you can change between your different weapons.

There are a few other things I have worked on, but these are the ones that have been compiled into the game so far. Be sure to check out our Facebook page if you're interested in our progress, we try to keep it updated when we've added something big.

Long Overdue Progress Update

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been working on learning how to use Scaleform to make a custom HUD and menu system for our class project in UDK.

As of now I have a skeleton menu which will have a graphical improvement when we have our User Interface(UI) class. You can change pages on the menu, adjust the resolution, volume, and toggle fullscreen of the game. I still need to implement the ability to set custom keys for the different attacks/buffs that the character has. I am also working on writing up a tutorial for class about how to use Scaleform, and how to make it so our menu comes up by default instead of the UDK default menu. Once I get it completed I'll try and upload a video of it.

I've also been working on some particle systems to use in our game. Here are clips of them:

• Possibly the Mouse Cursor, or plant effect - slow version:

• Same as above, faster version:

• Some falling debris:

• A poof of dust, for when the character hits the ground after a long fall, or when the largest enemy steps:

• An alternate of the one above, with a lot fewer particles:

• Last, we have a particle system for when an enemy gets hit(The enemies are rock-like.):

Well, that is what I've been working on the past couple months in school. I hope to have the menu functionality completed in the next two weeks. I'll try and keep the blog updated as I make progress.