Polished Artifact 3
3D Pinball (Space Station Pumpernickel)
(Polished the Ball Return to Player)
Details
This 3D Pinball style game was created in Unreal Engine 4. This game takes place in a space station where you have to help defend Pumpernickel station from ships that are attacking, by firing at the ships to cause damage and earn points with in turn would speed up the ball to create difficulty with catching it. With each shot the ball returns to the player, they will have to catch the ball to be able to fire it again. If the player misses the ball they can cause damage to the station, which can result in destroying the station and ending the game. For the Artifact that I polished I chose the ball as it could get to a point where as the player gained points the ball could skip over the catch portion of the player and just cause damage to the station or cause it to try to get to the station but miss and go around the player multiple times. So I went into the code and slowed the ball down and put a cap on how fast it can possibly go. Also I needed to update the ball as it could bounce and fly around for a long amount of time without returning, so I added a timer to have it return it it gets lost. This shows that I can go in and update code that is already written and fix broken items, which as most everyone know there can be many in video games.
Here is the Opening screen
This is the Main Gameplay Screen
Here I will explain some of the code manipulation that I performed.
Then this video will be some gameplay after I have updated the code.
Reflection
This artifact took some time to perfect but utilizing a switch statement block in unreal was efficient. Once I created a section to convert the players score to a single number, so that it could be used in the switch statement it was very simple and easy to implement. I also gave the ball a timer so the game could move forward at a constant pace and not have the player waiting for the ball to return. This was a bit challenging as I had to find a way to start the timer each time it collided with something. But after a few trial and errors builds, it just seems so simple now that I found the answer, I had the ball start a timer when it was spawned (shot) then added a timer reset each time it hit something and it the timer got to zero then it would trigger the return code to head back to the cannon.
The biggest challenge for the ball was the placement of the timer to tell the ball to return at the correct time. I first tried placing the timer in its own section of the code but I couldn't use any of the hit components as they were not active at the correct times. But after some time I found the correct spot where the begin started the timer then the bounce counter would reset the timer until the bounces hit their max and ran the return code.
The whole reason I decided to add a timer was due to the feedback that a friend gave me as he had hit a certain item where the ball trailed off and they basically sat there for 2 minutes till the ball finally hit another few objects and then returned to them. This was a interesting find that they informed me of and then I added it in to the artifact polish part.
The Artifact got improved by adding a timer if it trails off a a slow pace, as well as the balls speed will go up over time as the player scores point but it has a cap on the speed so it will not be moving to fast for the detection triggers to catch it and cause damage to the station or be caught by the players canon.
