Devlog 1: Climbing System - Initial Implementation

Devlog 1: Climbing System - Initial Implementation

Objective: The purpose of this week was to implement the basic ledge grabbing and horizontal movement functionality based on the YouTube tutorial.

Project Name: Mini Project

New Features:
  • Ledge Grabbing:
    • Implemented functionality enabling the player to detect if they are underneath a ledge while jumping.
    • This allows the player to grab onto a ledge
    • This Involved setting up collision to detect the position of the ledge and changing the player state.
  • Ledge Grab Animations:
    • I Integrated animation assets for the player character's ledge grabbing pose and idle hang, These animations where from Mixamo.
    • I created animation blueprints to handle the different animations states the player character could be in.
    • I added code into my climbing system code to trigger these animation.
  • Side to side movement
    • I enabled the player movement along the ledge while hanging.
    • This involved creating more collision detection to make sure that there were still a ledge for the character to hang onto.

Progress So Far

  • The initial implementation of the climbing system has went smoothly so far, following the YouTube tutorial has allowed me to learn about new tools within the unreal engine.
  • The tutorial has been straight forward to follow, and clear. allowing me to have a decent understanding of the concepts.
  • This week has allowed me to gain more experience in:
    • Handling Player Input Within Unreal Engine 5
    • Creating Component system for modular code in Unreal Engine 5
    • Animation Blueprint management and understanding
    • Collision Detection and state management.

Next Steps:

  • Integrate the Advanced Locomotion System (ALS) into the project to enhance character movement and responsiveness.
  • Implement the mantle system, allowing the player to climb onto the top of ledges from the hanging state.
  • Continue following the tutorial, while making sure to understand the "why" behind each implementation step.
  • Begin documenting the code more thoroughly for future reference (Comments inside Blueprints).

Challenges

A significant challenge I faced during this week of implementing the climbing system, was adapting to unreal engine node-based blueprint system. This is because I have a lot of experience with Unity and C#, unity using c# scripting provides me a linear texted based approach to programming, were it is more simple for me to read through as the code isn't in a 2D space. Transitioning to Unreal's visual scripting required a shift in how I read code whenever I faced a bug or issue. When dealing with a complex code in unreal engine I found it hard to find what is referencing what inside the code, which increased bug fixing time for me.

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