Dungeon Crawler - Final

posted in DavinCreed
Published February 18, 2019
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Started late and finished late.

The method I went with for generating the dungeon had a lot of issues to work through. I've almost gotten them all worked out, there are only a few edge cases left to deal with. I created some sound effects, found some other ones from free and purchased libraries. Made a wandering music track. I created a game logo after settling on a title the day before. All of that on the last day.

The day the submission was due, everything was going great, I fixed a lot of last minute bugs and then tried to get a build. What I was using to generate the tiles in UE4 is marked as "experimental" so it was preventing the project from building due to "missing files." So I had to change how I was doing that. I made a few changes and then my computer froze. Restarted, stupid updates, and load the project again and it happens again. So something in my project was causing the problem. That took me up to about 4pm, when I thought the thing was due in an hour. So I called it quits.

Later I narrowed things down to a change I made that created an infinite loop in the editor which would lock out and freeze everything making it almost completely unresponsive. I could not load up the project without crashing my computer. After much restarting I figured out which object was causing the problem. So I had to get rid of the object causing the error, but that object was the thing that generated the levels. Not just and easy thing to lose and rewrite from scratch. Luckily, I had thought to back up the project sometime earlier in the day, I had only lost a few bug fixes still fresh in my memory on that single object. Good backup habits saved me this time.

So I got everything to build and thought I was done. Not so fast, says the game when the player falls right through the floor. Now I have to figure out what's going on. Put in a floor that wasn't dependent on the tiles but the player and enemies can walk right through the walls still. Give each character box collision which prevents most walking through walls but looks like crap. Turns out that a bug on the tile map thing I was using is that each tile that is supposed to have collision only had one tiny point in the middle, so things could just walk right through in between them, and even fall right through. Sweet, everything worked great up until I tested the build.

I had been keeping a grid of my own that I was using to determine where things were on the level so I could make the rooms work. It was much easier than dealing directly with the tile map. I created two objects with simple collision boxes exactly the same size as the tiles, one stubby one for the floor, and one for the walls. When I placed a tile I would also place one of these where the tile should go. At this point I might as well just put some images on them and skip the whole tile map altogether. I might in the future because I can see some advantages to it.

Anyway, I got it done a day late and a dollar short. A few bugs remain though. Too late for the competition, but I'm submitting it anyway.

 

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