Day 7 - Tears Saltier Than The Dang Ocean

211 days ago by NvN

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Project Finished

Today was the FINAL day of development for this game and I'm happy to say that it's FINISHED! Although the first two days were incredibly rough, basically doing zero progress, I've managed to pull through. I know that if I were to actually get stuff done those two days I would've added a lot more to the game. Anyways, here's the strings I tied today. It's not much in terms of workload, especially compared to every day before today, but because yesterday I finished the big bulky stuff, today I could focus more about tiny visual and audio adjustments, which was still pretty time consuming.

Completed

Audio

I integrated sound effects and ambient sound into the game. During the preplanning of Speedy Salmon I scrolled through freesounds.org and found a bunch of audio that I knew I wanted in my game, and used basically all of them. I imported the wav. files into Unreal, and for some, like the river audio, I made into sound cues to create the attenuation for the environment and it sounds really good.

All Sound Files Used and Sound Cues Created

River Audio Volumes Being Variably Set w/ Volume Settings

Pause Menu

I implemented a pause menu. Very simple. I had to add a new input action, and add that to the input mapping context, and create the functionality to pause the game and bring up the UI. One unique thing I did add was an unpause buffer, which is the countdown after you press "Resume" before the game unpauses, giving the player time to prepare to get back into it. This buffer can be adjusted in the options menu, which I go more into next.

Pause Menu and Unpause Buffer Countdown After Pressing "Resume"

Controls and Options Submenus

I also finally finished the rest of the main menu, the big thing being the options submenu. But first, I created an "Exit" button, which quits the game of course, and I also decided to delete the "Credits" button since I'll just have them in the description of this itch.io page. Next, I made functionality to show or hide the controls and options submenus depending on which one you press. I also just added some text in the controls to show what keyboard buttons to press for how to play the game, which is also included in the description of the page. I know I mentioned in an earlier devlog that this game will have controller support. Unfortunately I don't have much time to work on this project to have fully tested it out. Along with that, I would also need to make a controller graphic to properly show what joystick or buttons to press, rather than describing it through a text.

The crucial thing I completed is the options menu. First I learned about creating a Game Instance, which I used to store variables, i.e. the various settings to be used in various blueprints that take effect into the game. Next I worked on the UI and the UI functionality, and had whatever values the player inputted or changed in the UI be transferred to the overall game settings. From there, other blueprints would get a reference to the game instance and retrieve whatever values necessary for their own functionality.

Settings Game Instance

Options Menu

The settings included are:

SFX Volume: sounds such as water splashing and sloshing, UI hover, unpause buffer countdown
Ambient Volume: river audio in the game and main menu
Swim Sensitivity: controls how quickly you swim in all directions
Unpause Buffer: the number of seconds to wait after resuming a game before it unpauses
Disable Rocks: disable rock obstacle spawning
Disable Bears: disable bear obstacle spawning