Spike's Digital Media Blog

So far my game has had two light rendering issues that I had wished to resolve: 1. The black texture for the bottomless pit the player falls down, if they fail, was casting shadows on the black void part, which deep black holes in the ground don't tend to do. I fixed this by changing the texture from a plain untextured black to slick metallic black using the unreal material editor. By doing this it made the material darker so you couldn't see shadows on its surface afterwards. 2. I also ran into an issue that I always do and have on every unreal project that I have ever done where if you stand too close to a wall or a bright object, the screen begins to dim elsewhere. I finally decided enough was enough and looked up how to switch off this dimming feature as many of my levels will contain large white surfaces which would cause the screen to dim with this default render setting.  It turns out after approximately a minute of searching the forum that all I had to do was enter the ...

Here is my updated poster design for the project, after feedback I came to the conclusion that Yellow and White lettering looks far superior to the Black I had been using up until this point, fitting more with the brief of a SUMMER Exhibition and of course the two colours being more interesting again than just Black. In terms of completed deliverables I now have 3 and feel I can comofortably do the other 12ish before January 10th as I have had a lot of practice in Illustrator techniques too and a more finalised design.  I've also been told to pay attention to which deliverables require text and which don't, which I hadn't considered beforehand.

  Here is some Test Footage of my level so far. After a few weeks, I finally got the main platform types (Green on a timer, Blue and orange switching) working, as such I rushed to make a the first level as a test level of sorts to see how well platforming actually performs now I have it coded in. Rather than being part of the level, the platforms are separate objects that exist contained outside of the level as an actor as its own "object" so they all must be moved simultaneously if being adjusted in the level. Adjusting 1 Platform of the collection of 60+ must be done within the object itself. This is the blueprint actor that contains every single Blue/ Orange Platform within the level. First, the 3 connected separately at the beginning enable the 'E' Key to be pressed in the context of the Blueprint, which then activates a "Looping Multigate" Node which causes the sets of platforms to infinitely be able to switch states when the 'E' is pressed. The...

Since my first Blog for the RA Project progress has been sluggish to say the least, only having about 15% of the final deliverables completed as of writing, because up until now I had been prioritissing the Workload for my Submissions for the Degree Project and Dissertation but with both of them now submitted and having no more submissions until the one for this assignment on January 10th I feel I can now accelarate progress dramatically and use the time I was saving for those assignments for this one. Here is a practice poster I made just to get to grips with the process. I'll probably end up removing most of the text for submission but this sort of acts as a starting point for the direction I will be going. This is the Postcard Mock-Up that I made last week. I'm not entirely sure if I ned the back-side of the Postcard, I may actually ask if it's neccesary next session but it was at least good practice in formatting Graphic design.

This my death-screen for when Player's incur a Death-state by the Health Value being 0. This is my current Pause Screen. These nodes are just so the script can reference the widget, which are contained in their own blueprint for 2D UI but must be referenced by the Player This is just the code to bring up the pause menu. To do that is creates the widget for the menu, sets the controls so the player can only move the mouse and freezes the game world This set of nodes for checking the death state of the player and keeping track of the player health. Here is a Step-by-step of what code it executes: The first node checks for any types of damage applied from the "Apply Damage" Node in other Actors that applies to the Player It then subtracts the amount of damage from the player's current health which becomes the set health float (Clamped between the 0 and the MaxHealth Variable)  This set health is the referenced by the Health Bar which is allowed to be called in and refere...

  Today I set-up some basic menu screens for the project, this was mainly for the purpose of adding the functionality of switching between 'Levels' and having somewhere for the player to go from the Pause Menu in-game to the Main Menu. I have also done a rudimentary wireframe, if you can see the screenshot (No thanks to Blogger's compression) for these menus because I want to put a little more effort in this time, compared to the past where the Controls Screen for instance is just a block of text.

  This is my first attempt at turning the full game title into a logo, beyond just an app/ desktop icon size as with the first iteration. While the Feedback was generally positive, there are some issue that will need to be addressed with it moving forward. The embossing on the Cubes looks kind of outdated and the font for the text could be a little blockier to match the 'H'. I was also asked if I could fit in something to symbolise that the title is referring to Brain Hemispheres, but I'm not sure how I would fit that in and I like the idea of the squares being used to represent the two sets of switching platforms. As a funny side-note my Logo was also called "1980's Countdown", which I can't unsee now.

  What Life Gives You (@zestarius.the.yellow) • Instagram photos and videos https://www.instagram.com/p/DB1qazxtQjU/ So this is my account for the Lemon project, @zestarius.the.yellow  . I've decided to wait until now to do my first blog about the project because I wanted to break down the account's evolution up until now and how it has changed since the beginning. Initially I had struggled to come up with content to create or repost, especially about Lemons. A good starting point was/ is the 2024 US Election because of how current it is, but other than that I had very little of an idea of which niche I would fill that would make people follow. The posts felt aimless. I figured out from asking a friend early on that doing a follow for follow scheme for ~300ish accounts that follow similar niche "meme" accounts can be a good way to increase traffic and get the ball rolling, as such, so that's mainly how I've made it to 100 but now people who I didn't follow...