Project Type: Prototype  
Engine: Unreal Engine 4.24.2 
Language: C++

In this Devlog we'll go over a more general view on the prototyping phase of DEADBEAT and how we progressed throughout this week of development.

This prototype is served mainly as exploration for the DEADBEAT development. Code and methods that are used in this prototype are mainly focused towards development speed rather than performance or implementation.

Grid-Spawning

DEADBEAT has a big focus on traps, trying to dodge these traps is one of the main goals of the  players.
It's very important that we have a lot of control over these traps and how they are spawned. That's how this prototype was created. 
In this prototype we experimented with the ways of creating a Grid in unreal engine, and using SpawnPoints to spawn traps at certain locations. Using this method along with some DebugLines and Spheres will give us an accurate representation of the grid.

We can then use Meshes of the same size as traps and spawn them on the spawn locations (blue dots). Resulting in a very controlled and nice way of spawning items in our prototype without causing any overlapping. This resulted in the following:

Now that we had a solid grid system, we could combinate it with the BPM prototypes and some other prototypes regarding movement, ...

Gameplay Prototype

For this prototype we decided to bring mechanics together to give us a general view of what the game would play  and look like in the future. This prototype's sole purpose was to give us a general view of the game we envisioned.

In this prototype we combined Player Movement, Simple UI, BPM events and Grid spawning. 
We also played around with Mesh animations and timing these to the beat. 

Implementing a good co-op system proved to be difficult so we decided to go with a more naïve approach for this prototype and focus on making it work. Luckily this worked out well enough for now.

We also managed to implement Health and collision with the traps to simulate a player death scenario.
Additionally a punch mechanic was also implemented, allowing players to interact with each other and try to kill each other.

The resulting gameplay of this prototype can be seen here: https://streamable.com/t139d.

Packaging Errors

When we were finished and satisfied with the prototype, we decided to do a package build to upload on Itch.io. 
Sadly enough when trying out the build, the game crashed immediately. It took some hours to figure out the exact problem and how to solve it, but the biggest tip we can give is enabling "Include Debug Files" and running the game with -log (using CMD or Powershell).

This will ensure more readable Log outputs and will also show you a call stack of when the crash happened.
This helped us a a lot in trying to figure out where the root of the crashes where.

What's Next?

DEADBEAT will go in production phase in a few days. This will mean we will stop experimenting and start working on DEADBEAT itself. Things like working together on the same project might proof difficult, but we will definitely find our way.

In the production phase Devlogs will go more about general progress and updates in the game.

We are all very excited to make this game a reality, and that's what we're going to do.

DEADBEAT.