Day 10 - Status Update
So, it is Day 10, according to the updated road map for this jam I should be done with Art Research, unfortunately things did not proceed as smoothly as expected, let's have a status update.
In the last 7 days I researched and practiced in Cryengine, I only ventured in the two visual scripting tools provided, Flow Graph and Schematycs, purposely avoiding text based scripting in either C++ or C#, my reasoning for this is that theoretically Visual Scripting tools are made to allow designers to make quick prototypes, for a game jam they should be perfectly sufficient.
I must say I am dissatisfied, Flow Graph I understand predates Unreal Blueprinting, so it is logical that is way more limited, Schematycs on the other hand aims to complement Flow Graph, and it seems to be heavily inspired by Blueprinting, althogh it has differences which might make it even better if properly used, however it is still a beta tool, and to me it also felt limited, and sometimes very buggy, the fact that spawning a Schematyc in runtime breaks many function forced me to alterate the design of my game slightly, as a design solution turned out to be the only solution to a technical problem.
I do understand that Flow Graph is old and Schematycs still a beta, but unlike Unreal Bluprints, the systems provided in Cryengine just are not as complete, not even for a simple prototype.
Current state
Shooting: I am able to spawn bullet like object, propel them forward either using or not physics, I am able to detect a collision (although only by having box triggers around the colliding objects), and trigger a response (I practiced turning off a blue light), however while these thing work individually, there are some bugs when I try to make them work together, to prevent issues I now plan to have bullets be always present in the scene, and switching between an active and passive state, they would stay passive in the player's hand, once triggered they would be shot forward, and once hit their target (or after a maximum movement period), they would deactivate and teleport back in the player's hand
Enemy AI: I still have to look into AI, however I am already able to move entities and detect when they are hit by a bullet, the only uncertainty is them being spawned and destroyed, since spawning Schematycs break systems, and I was not able to figure out how to destroy entites, the common solution might be just teleport them away, similarly to what happens with bullets
Shooting - Resource System: I have not looked into it, but as far as I have noticed, I should be able to be able to build it easily
Lighting System: again I have not tried this yet, but I am familiar with all components necessary to create it
Art
Pipeline: I am having some issues dealing with placeholders, so far I only dragged some assets from some of the sample projects provided by Crytek on the marketplace, however they all had issues in loading their materials and textures, which I did not look into since they were just placeholders anyways, but I now I will have to, as the engine is giving me literally thousand of warnings about that
Enemies: I would still like to build this in MagicaVoxel, however I am postponing this task for the 3rd of August
Bullets: I will probably reuse a particle effect from one of the CryEngine sample projects as the bullet
Hand(s): I will probably be using the official Vive Controller model to represent them in-game
Environment: I am not sure yet what I will be doing for the environment, considering I am running out of time with the core mechanics