Game Development Blog for 2025 Uni Project

Updates about the progress of my project's development are tagged #project notes

Progress in the creation of art assets are tagged #art assets

Notes from class are tagged as #class notes

Final versions of assets are tagged #final assets

Video of or notes about examples in other games are tagged with #other games and inspiration

Plenty of the posts that are just updates on problems with coding are untagged.

Music edited into a single recording.

These are the seperate parts used in-game which can loop forever.

First time trying to make a dynamic soundtrack. I was pretty limited on time though so not the most inspired work. Writing it in phrygian mode quickly gave it the right sort of tone without thinking too hard about unusual chord progressions.

On top of the descriptions provided of where the sounds come from, all sounds were further edited in Audacity.

These two sounds play when the player successfully hits an enemy with a spell and when the enemy is defeated. They were recorded from a small singing bowl I own. Both have had their pitch altered.

The sound for a spell. This was made with a combination of scraping folded up paper across my desk, shaking a small bell off of a lindt chocolate bunny and hitting my desk with my hand.

This is a combination of different things I could tap or hit together but primarily a glass I had on my desk and a small metal dish used for drying out paint pigments. Reverb effect added at the end.

All the enemy sounds involved playing an erhu incorrectly. Each additionallly include recordings of pan pipes, a didgeridoo or rolling rocks and tealight holders over my desk.

Lastly, the sound used for the dodge is a sound I made for a previous project but did not end up using. It uses audio from a video I took at a theme park attempting to record the distinct roaring sound produced by roller coasters manufactered by Bolliger & Mabillard. I later realised its potential use for sound effects.

Added particle effect on successfull parry to make it clearer.

I've created almost all of the UI for menues etc and they function enough that I have been able to package my first build of the game. This includes a start menu.

I had great trouble getting this to work in Unreal Engine. My initial idea was to begin playback of all sections as the level started and just adjust the volumes to switch between them, this way they are naturally synced up.

When I tested this, it turned out each part restarted when it was switched to. So, instead I tried to get the playback time of the current section and set the playback time of the new one to where I needed it. Turns out this is incredibly difficult to do in Unreal Engine for whatever baffling reason.

Eventually I discovered there is a 'Play even when silent' setting in the audio cue settings and this solved the problem and let me use the original plan.

I might be able to make a custom collision setting that ignores only the player.