DevLog 2: More Prototyping and We Have a Name

Welcome to the second devlog for Full Broadside, our explosive pirate ship battle game. This week, we sharpened core systems, from camera angles to cannon collisions. Let’s dive in.

Camera Systems: Locking the Perspective

When moving around on a single axis, you can already see the flaws of the perspective camera. For our context, the orthographic camera is the clear choice, because the top-down experience shouldn’t be impacted by perspective distortion.

Looking from the top you see how much space every camera covers. A problem that arises here is the translation of the ship. The green area would be almost a 1 to 1 ratio, meaning that for every step to the right, you could go a step up.  The left camera on the other hand has more space upwards, meaning that up and down movement would be slower than on the right camera. To make it feel right we would have to increase the movement speed for up and down movement. 

Another problem would be aiming cannons. The distance between ships in the front and ships in the back would be different. 

The red arrows below are all the same length, but as you can see in the left camera, the arrow gets shorter when aiming up or down instead of left and right.

Collision

Upon spawning the cannonballs, they will receive an impulse to throw them along the desired trajectory. Should they make contact with another object, they will check if said object is their player, and if not, they will destroy themselves. If their collider had a UHealthComponent then that component will take 1 damage. If said component notices that it’s health attribute has dropped to 0 then it will make the player respawn with full health. 

Art Style

The style we have chosen to go for, especially for our visual effects, is Zelda: The Wind Waker. We have been prototyping and trying to recreate the style they use when it comes to the movement of the ship through the water as shown below

Toon Shader

Foeke worked on a post-processing toon shader, that can be applied to any object you like. There is also an overlay material for the boats, unfortunately it does not seem to work well with the ghost shader from last week's prototype for the moment. For the ghost shader, it was made as the master shader and added the option to add a texture for the overall object. An effect was added that can be activated when a boat gets hit. There is an adjustable slider to make the boat glow up for a moment in a chosen colour. Right now it is added to the base colour, but we can just make it 1 single colour too, depends on what we like.

Another Attempt at Water

As water plays such a big part in our game, it is important that the mechanics of this work well. Rani used the unreal engine water and landscape plugins to simulate a boat floating and sailing on water. Using a landscape and a water body ocean, you can quickly recreate an entire ocean with a click of a button. 

In a blueprint there is a simple setup. In the buoyancy class, you can manipulate drag, center offset, etc. It is important to make sure that simulate physics is turned on in the static mesh.

In the Buoyancy class you need to assign platoons. These are not visible! The best way to make them is by adding sockets in the mesh itself and using that data to add platoons. Do not add the sockets in the Buoyancy class, this causes weird behaviour. The camera is in 3rd person view.

In the event graph above makes it so that the boat can move naturally.  In order for the buoyancy class to actually work you need to make sure that the collision in the waterbodyocean is set to waterbodycollision! This is something that when you activate the plugins creates an error after which you will need to manually add an .ini file. When this file is included, you get the option to add waterbodycollision. The values are for keyboard, not controller (values are too high for a sensitive controller). It is important to note that the bouncy characteristic in objects only has an effect in places where there is a landscape underneath, in other words the sailable area is limited to the size of the initial landscape!!