Xodius Studios: Forgotten Memories

Welcome to the final blog before graduation on June 2nd, marking the end of a long journey. As one chapter closes, another begins, doesn't it? Preparing the game for production has been quite a challenge, to say the least. The team and I have thoroughly enjoyed working on the game and have great hopes for its success. With additional time and dedication, we aim to address many, if not all, of the current issues before introducing more content. We have engaged in discussions about further enhancing the demo and taking it to the next level. We have set the game's early access launch for the 31st of this month, just a few days away. This allows us a brief window to address minor issues identified by our testers, director, and instructors. We sincerely appreciate all the assistance we have received in reaching this milestone. Thank you all for following our blogs, and please remember that May 31, 2023, is the release day. We eagerly anticipate your presence on that day! We will be

        Xodius Studios Blog #13 A Little Shine to Make it Prime! Author:Justin Palmer Published: 05/25/23 21:00 The Problem:     The main problem this week was getting the game ready for a demo release.  There were a lot of minor and major bugs that still needed fixed.  Finding and fixing bugs are essential to a well working game that can make the player feel more involved and 'in the zone', so to speak.  If a player doesn't enjoy the game, they will not talk about it to their friends, and most likely won't pay for any add-ons that may be made further down the road.  Polishing is just as important as getting the game to function!  Some of the bugs we found after playing multiple playthrough were: Shopkeeper not working with controller, some corner pillars having gaps from the floor and needing lowered, enemies weren't dying when using the bow and arrow, tutorial popups all were doubled on accident, and the text would stack on each other when popup occurred.   The S

     Xodius Studios Blog #13 Final UI Assets: Consumable slots, Equip menu slots, Inventory slots. Consumable Hotkey System. Bug Fixes: Duplication, Health & Mana Cap, Consumable Amount Update, Bow and Misc. Spawning action menu. Author: Kanitha Charoenpanich Published: 05/24/2023 20:24 The Features: I finally finished my consumable slot system during this final week of polishing. The consumable slot system works with the inventory, action menu, equip menu, and consumable slots. I also added the final touches on assets. I added a border to the inventory, equipment menu, and consumable slots. The consumable slots also got an ornament placeholder when there are no items equipped in the consumable slots. The health and mana also got a new code. The consumable amounts also update correctly on all menus when picking up another potion. The inputs in the project settings were also updated to work with the player controller input that controls the hotkeys for the consumable slots.  Current

 Name: Jared Barker Date: May 23rd, 2023 Time: 12:28 AM EST Final Polish in "Forgotten Memories" I'll keep it brief being that this will be our final log for this game. I managed to add atmospheric fog in the main level and I also added sounds for the game.  For the atmospheric fog, I had to do some adjustments as well as confirm the adjustment to the rest of the team. One of the adjustments was the fog multiplier. The fog multiplier had to be adjusted to 80 and the density multiplier adjusted to 1.9. Also, I had to uncheck the atmosphere affecting the color. It was making the fog purple and it doesn't fit with the atmosphere for the main level. With all of these adjustments, it brought a wonderful atmosphere and emersion to the main level. As for the sounds, some of them were added in the animation/animation montage, and others needed to be played in the blueprint. For the animation, I added sound notifications for the player's walk, death, etc. It needed to be a

      Xodius Studios Blog #12 Game Controller to Control Widgets! Author:Justin Palmer Published: 05/18/23 21:00 The Problem:     The main problem this week was getting a game controller to work with the game.  Although the SteamDeck comes with touch functionality to work as a mouse, we wanted to be able and play the game from start to finish by just using a controller.  Playing with a game controller makes the game feel a lot more fun in my opinion.  The issue arises when you have a widget pop-up as the game controller is still controlling the player character.   The Solution:     There is a function called 'Set Focus'.  This sets the Gamepad Controller to control the widget.  The components of the widget have a variable called 'isFocusable' and must be turned on for the controller to access each specific part of the widget you want the controller to interact.  Therefore, after adding and changing the InputMode to 'UI Only' (so the player character will stop r

First off welcome back to our blog. It has been a long week of development and getting the bosses to work more or less correctly has been a pain. I had to rebase the bosses and create a few new functions to handle their fire attacks. I have them firing when they are supposed to minus the one or 2 random fireballs that pop out with the wing attack from time to time. We will call that a feature and move on. I spent a few hours of balancing all the enemies to make them a bit harder and to knock them back a bit upon being struck.  I also spent a lot of last week getting the shop/quest system implemented. It now works as intended and can accept more than one quest as well. Thats all for now, thanks for reading. PS........ It's been a while coming, so wish us luck and hope you come back to try out the game after release!! Release day May 31, 2023. Graduation day June 2, 2023!!

    Xodius Studios Blog #12 Final UI Assets: Shop, Audio menu, Graphics Menu, Credits Menu, Player Stats Bar. Hover and Pressed UI to Audio, Credits, & Graphics Buttons. Bug Fix: Shop Author: Kanitha Charoenpanich Published: 05/18/2023 15:35 The Features: I added the final UI art to the shop this week, including audio, graphics, credits menu, and player stats HUD. The hover and pressed UI to the audio, credits, and graphics button. I was also helping Mike fix the shop bug. Each menu needed a new background and buttons. I changed the shop UI to also match the rest of the game. The shop bug was that the shop items were not appearing in the shop. Mike figured out that we needed to just delete and re-add the shop NPC to make the items appear again.  Current Status of Features: Photo 1 - Audio Menu The Audio menu got a new background. It also got new buttons and the volume sliders are colored to match the rest of the color pallet. Photo 2 - Graphics Menu The graphics menu also got a new

 Name: Jared Barker Date: May 16th, 2023 Time: 10:06 PM EST Polishing the Main Level in "Forgotten Memories" This will be different from the other blogs for the purpose of it being the week before the final week of the final month. I've been working on adding details to F1-Landscape for the main level as well as working on making the music manager and fixing the arrow trail for the arrow trap.  For the music manager, there are two blueprints to this equation: MusicManager_BP: Play the music with a set voice multiplier and change the music for each collision box. MusicChangeVol_BP: Changes the music whenever the player hit's the collision boxes. The only problem with the music manager is that the music doesn't stop when the player paused the game. Other than that, everything else was working smoothly. As for the arrow trap, I use the Niagara particle system to create a trail and attach it to the tail of the arrow. So now it shows the trail and disappears after a fe

  AI Adventures #12 Testing on the steam deck has been going well. With a few graphical tweaks and some optimization we are able to get a smooth 60 fps! It does not seem like much but keeps the game fluid and running well. I have also been working on a quest system and the main bosses fire attacks. here is a preview of it in action. I have begun rebasing the bosses to have their own base classes due to a few conflicting overrides present in the derived class. Lots of mumbo jumbo talk, but it should fix the present issues in the next push. Fun stuff. Stay tuned for more, Release is May 31, 2023. 

    Xodius Studios Blog #11 Breakable Pots! Author:Justin Palmer Published: 05/11/23 21:00 The Problem:     The main problem this week was making the game more enjoyable for the destructive players.  I wanted to make the pots breakable so the player can destroy them and relieve some stress and frustration.  The issue begins when the developer wants to split up a static mesh.  If you make a physics asset on import, the physics body is the entire body of the item, and therefore the structure is intact if you try to remove triangles/faces from the mesh.                   Problem Solution:     After doing some research a plugin called 'Apex Destruction' was found. (Settings -> Plugins -> Apex Destruction). This plugin turns a static mesh into multiple static meshes when hit.  By configuring the settings the pot now LOSES it's 'rigid sphere body' and turns into multiple parts, just like a broken pot!  This helps make the game feel more realistic to the player and

   Xodius Studios Blog #11 Final UI Assets: Pause Menu, Inventory, Consumable Slots, Main Menu, System Menu, Consumable Menu, and Slots. Final Background on the Loading screen and Main Menu. Author: Kanitha Charoenpanich Published: 05/11/2023 16:30 The Features: This week I added the final UI art to the pause menu, inventory, consumable slots, main menu, system menu, consumable menu, and slots. I also added the final backgrounds to the loading screen and the main menu. The inventory got a complete makeover. I changed the buttons and the bag. I added a background blur to the inventory menu. I need to change the style of the inventory slots but I haven't found the correct assets for it. I plan on finishing the consumable slots soon, I just haven't had the time for it. Current Status of Features: Photo 1 - Main Menu Besides the inventory/pause menu, I think that the main menu is also my favorite. It is so aesthetically pleasing. I got some help from Justin on where to place the bu

 Name: Jared Barker Date: May 9th, 2023 Time: 11:51 PM EST Polishing the main level geometry in "Forgotten Memories" The Problem: The major problem was the level of streaming volume. So what happened was that whenever the camera is out of the level streaming volume, the level disappears and makes the player fall. This can be annoying because not only will the player be out of bounds, but they will be disappointed with how much they have clipped out of the level. It's not a critical bug, but it can be a big one if not dealt with as soon as possible. The Solution: There was only one solution that works when debugging the levels. That solution was resizing the level streaming volumes and adjusting their location. It's not a big solution, but it manages to be a huge save in the long run. With that being said that there weren't any additional volumes added for processing power purposes, and the volumes only occurred in specific levels in F1-NEW (persistent). All in all

  Testing on the Steam Deck   Where to begin, It has been a long month and now we are heading into our final month before graduation. Looking forward to it but also looking forward to having a bit more free time. We have decided to continue building the game while honing our skills in game development.   Now on to the fun part, testing out on the Steam Deck. Well, we have some performance issues on the steam deck that I have been working on with graphics settings and code optimization. Although this is to be expected, I hoped it would be a bit easier to fix the underlying issue, optimization. Fixing Blueprints and building, building and rebuilding again. It's a super repetitive process to be honest, it goes a bit like this.    Think about the code, compile, build, push, play, debug and finally repeat. Literally is what we have found ourselves doing for the past few weeks, its simple to run in the editor, a bit different when running it on the final device it was intended for when t