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Luis Zeno Jr
Battle Ball
Battle Ball was the first project I collaborated with when I joined Zygobot Studio. It's a sports themed game where players take control of four different characters, each with their own stats and power moves, and knock a ball towards their opponents goal to score a point. It was an interesting journey, not because I had to go backwards in game engine, Unreal 5 to Unreal 4, but this was the first project that focus on stats data and emulation. Many projects I have worked on in the past focus on individual characters or blueprints, or none at all. It felt like being a goldfish in an ocean when I joined in.
Majority of the programming have been done, but there was plenty of opportunity to improve the quality of the game. One of the suggestion I have is a powerup pickup, which the player can pick up a random powerup that appears on the screen and gain an advantage against their opposing team. I first pick my focus on picking up the powerup and allow the player to move faster for a certain amount of seconds before returning back to their normal speed.
At first I struggled on four various accounts in this project, the first is making the powerup appear and have the player pick up the powerup. For the most part, it felt like the player continuously collide with a wall and having little experience with Unreal 4 didn't help either with the experiment. But eventually, the powerup manage to be fixed.
The second comes from the character's stats. I focused first on one character, a character called Echo, as my base on how the powerup can work and how the speed boost would enhance the quality of the game. I manage to get the powerup to work with the speed boost, yet the issue stem to returning to the original speed. Once the powerup is over, the speed of the character felt more slower than it's original speed. I worked with the project lead in determining how we could fixed this and the project leader assisted me in correcting the error, at least for one character.
The third issue is implementing on all of the characters. As I have stated earlier, this was the first time I have focused on a stats based blueprint, something new I never worked on, and on a primitive gaming engine compare to the previous engine I used on my first four months of my Master's Degree program. I manage to use the same program coding I used on the test character, Echo, and implemented it on the rest of the individual characters, making sure that their stats increase upon usage of the powerup, and return to normal once the time has expired.
Lastly came spawning of the powerups, as a powerup would spawn once in the same location and may never spawn again. I learned new functions, such as sequences and proper Boolean usages, to have the powerups appear on the screen at a given duration time. It was something new to me and something I attempt to use in future projects when I am seeking to include a feature of powerups, aiming, or boosting that help optimize gameplay feel.
It's an interesting start to my time at Zygobot Studio, working on project with functions and components I never have experienced before. I am proud of being able to get a pickup feature function and gain knowledge on new components and functions that I would be able to use for future projects.
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