Rave Runner comes to a halt!

After an arduous week of polishing off and working on the runner, it is finally complete. However all was not as easy as it seemed. The common trend that seemed to occur was the good old 'one step forward ten steps back.' It often seemed as though Unreal Engine had a mind of it's own. Whether this is due to the university using Unreal 4.11.0 and my computer having 4.11.2 is a possibility. Part of the frustrating thing is that the Unreal Launcher does not seem to have a download for 4.11.0 at all. Hopefully full compatibility will be in line soon enough.

Over the course of the week I managed to implement what I set out to have in the game, plus some extras. I made the main menu, pause menu and game over menu look nice with different fonts and audio. I made my own title screen in Photoshop. Yes, my skills in that department may not be the greatest but it has a certain air of class to it I feel. I ended up creating a 'jump stamina' system where the player can jump up to five times. Once they have used these up they are unable to jump unless they collect blue stamina coins. The slow down feature that had already been implemented remained. I added an invincibility item that lasts a short amount of time so if the player runs into anything except a bottomless pit they will survive. I included a jump booster, which will allow the player to jump double the height for 5 seconds. The last add on was a nightmare and sadly is one of the broken features in the game.

A magnet item, which is supposed to draw all nearby gold coins to the player was made. After researching 5 or so tutorials this still proved impossible to create for such a mathematically sound principle. Fairly straight forward vector maths simply did not seem to be working. After having to do a botched up 'simulation of physics and collision' within the script itself I managed to get the magnet somewhat working. The issue is it works forever as soon as the player collects a magnet pickup, regardless of the script reversing all the changes and setting them as false after the time limit. Over 20hrs was spent trying to play around with work-arounds to no avail.

Overall I am still happy with the result. There are a few things that I would have liked to have fixed or add in looking back on the project. My final issue was that after building the game it was unplayable on my computer, despite running fine in the editor. I researched this and could not find a solution, but it seems as though it is something that can occur. Hopefully it is simply my own computer it was not liking, however this should not be the case being a top end gaming PC. Nonetheless, after spending hours upon hours researching and fiddling around in blueprints, I do feel that I have a better understanding on how they work, as well as different things one can try to solve issues. Blueprints are rather versatile if you know what you are doing, however they are still quite restricting as opposed to hard coding.

User supplied images.

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