First Person Game

This is something I forgot to document: how I manage my player's score.

It's pretty simple, every second if the player is wallrunning they get a point. Otherwise, they lose a point. If they get 300 points, the win state activates.

There are hundreds of things to consider when it comes to accessibility, but this document covers everything you would ever need to worry about:

After looking at the basic level, I broke down my games accessibility into 5 parts:

Motor:

My controls are relatively simple, however they cannot be remapped at the moment and gameplay often involves having to quickly input lots of buttons- so I'm definitely lacking in this department.

Cognitive:

The objective in my game is basic, and you are given are very standard and upfront tutorial (also showing you the controls), this is good, although the lack of interactivity might make it less useful to some. There isn't any dialogue either, so that isn't a worry.

Vision:

While the FOV in my game does change slightly, I've tried to make it as smooth as possible to prevent sickness in players.

Hearing:

There is nothing in my game that forces the player to hear the game, although the experience is enhanced with audio. Additionally, there is no narrator for any on-screen text, so that limits who can see the title screen containing rules and controls.

Speech:

Players aren't required to speak to play the game, and there is no voice chat, so there's no problems in this part.

This is the final feature to add to my game, background music that increases with pitch after you do some cool moves.

My first attempt was similar to how I made my cassette tapes change pitch- creating sound cues and changing a float parameter linked to pitch in them: (note that Create Sound 2D comes from BeginPlay and Coolness Check is called every time I mantle or wall jump).

This didn't work because the parameter that alters the pitch isn't read until the sound plays again.

After some research I found a forum post talking about an Adjust Volume node:

I thought there might be one like this for pitch, but I couldn't find it, so that didn't work.

Then I found this post, talking about a Set Pitch Multiplier Node:

Change pitch of sound cue while playing, without starting travk over? - Programming & Scripting / Blueprint - Epic Developer Community Forums (unrealengine.com)

This was what I needed to use. After adjusting other parts of the blueprint (spawning the sound instead of creating it, and incrementing the value of Coolness outside of the CoolnessCheck event) I ended up with this:

This was the final result:

While making this, I realized the sound of my cassette tapes were also too quiet, so I increased those so they could be heard over the music. Additionally, I increased how much Coolness you needed to trigger the music to make it feel more rewarding when a player finally did reach that point.

Ethics in games is something less thought about but still important as it will directly impact what audience you can market your game to. There are hundreds of ethical concerns to consider- this article has a few case studies on what ethics really mean in games and how it affects other aspects of the game and how people see them:

Something the article touched on that piqued my interest was the question of 'is it ethical to reference real life events in games?' This is a good question and I found it boiled down to why the company is doing it.

Another aspect of video ethics is how is the game actually putting the player in these situations and what effects this can actually have on the player. This video talks about the different kinds of ethical designs game can use:

A PEGI rating is the age suitability of the game which is decided by multiple content descriptors- basically things the game has.

I decided to research the PEGI rating of games similar to mine to see what mine would be rated.

Mirrors Edge: 16, moderate violence

Titanfall 2: 16, violence

Hi-Fi Rush: 12, bad language, violence

Cyberpunk 2077: 18, violence, bad language, sex

Portal: 12, bad language, violence

Since my game give my player a lot of freedom, I didn't think it would make sense to have a 'final goal' but I still wanted a win state. I took inspiration from the Bloons Tower Defense games, which let the player go into freeplay after winning, essentially letting them play forever:

In my game, I did something similar with a widget that pops up after the player reaches a certain score threshold. First I designed the very basic widget:

Then I had to send out an event after the player reached 300 score, which was simple enough:

I also created a 'Won' variable for use later.

From this win event, I stopped the players movement (so they actually had to respond to the message) and made the widget appear. Then I added code that allowed the player to actually interact with the widget. I initially couldn't find a Remove Widget node, but that was only because I was using context sensitive searching.

however this system didn't work exactly as I had hoped. Because of where the code that checks for 300 score is placed, the score would stop calculating if the player had won. My first attempt to fix this was to put the code at the end of the blueprint, but this meant the score was only checked after the 1 second delay- leading to inaccuracies.

The fix I came up with was to make the score check into a custom event:

This is the final result:

My mantle was occasionally causing my player to get stuck in walls when mantling by starting a wall run:

Since the wall run was the issue, my first idea was to disable the wall run collision box during a mantle:

This fixed the initial problem, but now I could no longer jump immediately after mantling as for some reason when I enabled the collision my vertical momentum stopped.

After a lot of tinkering with that method, I took a step back and tried a different approach: just shrink the collision box:

For this project I wanted my title screen to be unique, so I decided to make it in Unreal engine and have a camera go from it to the player.

My initial blueprint looked like this (first blueprint comes off of Event BeginPlay):

This was almost what I wanted, but the Disable Input node meant that the Any Key node could never fire. To fix this (and still keep the player stationary) I used a Disable Movement and Set Movement node. I also added a delay so the player couldn't move until the camera was ready.

This almost worked, but you could move the camera while it was transitioning. To fix that, I needed to disable input, but only after the player pressed any key. The final blueprint looked like this:

This was the final result:

I need to add some more assets to the title screen, but overall I'm really happy with how this turned out.

In my game I want the player to get feedback when they play well, and there are a few ways I want to do this.

The first one is gameplay focused: the player will get a boost of speed and a matching FOV increase to reward them for consistently playing well. This is the initial blueprint I had:

changing the FOV was easy, as I could just use the Set Field of View node:

But this instantly changed the camera and wasn't very smooth, so I tried this blueprint:

This however, didn't work and instead did this:

I later realized this was because I kept basing the interpolation of off the value of FOV which changes every time I interpolate, causing this weird effect. To fix this I set A to just be 90 (the base FOV) and promoted B to a variable which I could change. I also changed the blueprint to allow me to call the timeline anywhere I wanted, reducing unnecessary clutter.

This is what it looks like when I activate it (using a debug key, in game this will trigger off of things like mantles and wall jumps):

I finally transformed my level from a greybox into a fully modelled area for my player to jump around in. the first thing I did was add textures to all the buildings in the level- these were all from the default Unreal library.

Then I added garage doors to the smaller buildings in the level. To do this, I imported a .png of a garage door into the content drawer as a material, applied to to a cube and fit it in place.

This definitely isn't the most optimal way of doing this, but it gives the door a bit of depth in the world and is a really simple method, which suits me as I want to focus less on the art side for this project and more on the programming.

I also made a window with a similar method. I created 2 cubes, gave one a glass texture and the other a black texture, and overlapped them like so:

Again, not the best method but it gives the world some depth which is nice. I think if I had more time I would try to make the window boarded up to fit with the rundown vibe of the place.

(remvoving decals also fixed the problem of graffiti appearing on the back of the billboard)

The next thing I did was change the time of day to a nicer looking midsummer day. To do this, I just messed with the default lighting actors until I got a nice result.

It looks nice, but I think there's definitely more I could have done here.

The next thing I added was a chain-link fence going around the whole area. I made the texture for it by getting a png, making sure it seamlessly looped together, and made it a material like the doors.

However I ran into a problem here as I couldn't scale up the fence without having massive, unrealistic chains:

The solution I came up with was to just make an actor that was a bunch of small fence meshes joined together- this was much easier to scale up in the world.

The last thing I've added was graffiti to the billboards around the map. I imported all the decals from quixel bridge, as it features a massive library of graffiti textures- they were high quality and easy to use. I also added a green box to the front of the billboards to give the illusion it's been painted over many times.

One problem I ran into was that sometimes the decal would bleed onto the back of the billboard if I pushed them to far in:

The simple fix was just to not do that.

However, a more severe problem I ran into was that the decals bled onto any nearby actors, such as my cassette pickups:

After some research I came across this documentation for decals which had my solution:

1.5 - Receives Decals Off | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation

After unticking that box it worked how I wanted it to:

This tool also allowed me to fix the problem I had earlier of decals bleeding onto the back of the billboard more reliably as I could just stop the back of billboard from receiving decals.

This was something I had been meaning to add since the start, but didn't really know where to start. I initially tried an approach similar to the wall run- this may have worked but I had no idea how to actually make my character mantle, so I didn't get far:

After some research I found a couple of tutorials:

This one was slow, in third person and more focused on the animations so I couldn't really get anything out of it.

This tutorial was really simple and relevant to my project and I based basically all of my mantling off of this.

This is the final result:

The biggest tools I learnt from this were:

Casting Sphere traces

Breaking the results of a trace to get more info from them

Using reroute nodes to make bigger blueprints more legible

When my player picks up a cassette tape, I wanted it to do three things:

Play a sound that increases in pitch if the players picks up more tapes in quick succession

Add to the players score (displayed on the HUD)

Destroy the tape actor

I could destroy it and get a sound to play easily enough, and I also had it randomize between 2 sounds to give some variety:

However, as you can see in the blueprint, I couldn't figure out how to increase the pitch of the sound- it just didn't seem to go up. After some thought I realized the value of 'Pitch' was local to each cassette actor, so it didn't effect any of the cassettes as they were destroyed after being picked up.

Additionally, the pitch multiplier of the Play Sound 2D was really confusing to work with, and I got deep pitched sounds no matter what I put in.

After some research, I found this tutorial:

This showed me how to use sound cues and the Create Sound 2D node, which I used to create this blueprint:

This now does the three things I want, and I'm happy with how it functions in game:

Firstly, I wanted my pickup to have some visual effects so it was more appealing to the player, and to make it look like it was an actual pickup.

The first thing I added was a constant rotation to the actor. This took a few tries as my first attempt resulted in this:

My second attempt worked by using the set actor rotation node, but there was an easier way I found later on:

My third and final attempt only needed an Add Actor Local Rotation node, which did everything I needed for the rotation (there should be an event tick node coming off of it), but I also added a bobbing to the actor using a timeline node, and interpolating the distance between it's starting location and it's location 150 units up:

This works great, and I'm really happy with how it looks:

Sometimes when I began a wall run, my camera would tilt the wrong way. After some debugging, I found out this was because my line traces weren't accurately hitting the wall if I started the wall run at a specific point on the wall.

After some thought, I decided the easiest way to fix this was to make the line trace into a thicker box trace, so it always hit the wall.

The intital blueprint looked like this:

However this allowed the player to gain lots of height by jumping while hitting a wall, so I had to ensure their velocity was zero before lowering them:

The resulting effect was this:

I wasn't very happy with this result because the event node I was using was so general, and was frequently firing when I didn't want it to. Additionally, the wall run didn't feel very smooth and got the player little horizontal distance. I tried to come up with a better system, but I didn't fully understand vectors and how to use them in Unreal Engine, so I didn't get very far:

After this, I looked at a couple of tutorials to try and find a new point to start at.

I first tried this one, but it was focused on a third person perspective (meaning it went into more detail about animations as a result) and was very complex, at least for me, so I didn't use anything from it.

This tutorial was a lot more useful, and is the code I based my wall running of off. I did make some changes however, such as the collision being a flat cube instead of a cylinder. This also helped me add the jump you do after coming off of a wall run.

This is the end result:

The impact of audio on the player is an incredible tool to manipulate the players emotions and create immersion or intensity. There are many ways of achieving this however.

Five Nights at Freddy's typically throws the whole kitchen sink at you when it comes to emotional audio. This video goes into amazing detail about what the sound effects do to make you scared, and why.

On the other end of the spectrum, a game like Baba is You will use music to relax the player during puzzles, or give a sense of completion during the credits. The lighthearted sound effects also add to this- it's a slow, peaceful and floaty environment, completely opposite to FNaF.