A short game I'm working on for a game programming class at UCF.

The Lich Hand

TerryTheBerry

Tonight I grinded out a ton of work for our team project. I've fixed some AI stuff, got the frost beam spell working correctly, made a spawnpoint object that can be used for level scripting and respawn the object it had made, and a large handful of other things. It has been a rather hectic day to say the least.

Huge ton of stuff done today, but most notable are this frost beam effects, as well as enemies ragdolling on death (specifically, a *good* ragdoll)

So today I set up status effects for the game & helped a team member with the AI. Although it seems I forgot again to make my post. By by streak of 100 yaaay

So I locked in again today. I have the demo character fully animated, attacking events are now tied to animations, and the player now does a "Halo-like" lunge towards enemies when swinging the sword, among other changes and additions.

Very strange work today, but what I did was copy the behavior tree assets from Homelands (my game of like 8 years now) and just pasted it into our project. I cleaned it up to work with our game and now he have working AI... kind of. The AI works, but this is obviously not very fair right? the reason I did it is so both I could get a refresher on how the system worked and so I can provide better guidance for my teammate who is learning the AI system themself.

Additionally, I am attempting to get the demo knight model into the game, and I'm gonna see in just a second if Mixamo animations can be easily retargeted.

So throughout the day I worked on this knight model for the player / friendly NPCs. It's still a WIP, but its far along enough to be used for the demo deadline coming up on the 21st. It uses a (slightly) modified Mixamo rig, so we can actually fall back to using animations from there should I not have time to make certain ones.

As for the model itself, each piece is separate, like Mario 64. I chose to model it like this for three reasons: we're on a time crunch, we are going for a low-poly art style, and it also emulates armor pieces stuck together pretty well.

There are some obvious errors, like the ball-joint clipping through the chestpiece, but again, that can be fixed later.

Okay well a lot happened tonight, lets list it off:
- The weapons system is done, characters can equip a primary and secondary weapon
- The player now has an inventory of unlocked spells. pressing TAB will cycle through them (temporary)
- Temporary UI (healthbar & text for what spell you have equipped)
- Weapons are now damaging objects (specifically projectiles & sword attacks)
- Swords will damage all objects within the hurtbox.

Our deadline for a working demo is the 21, so we have quite a lot of work ahead of us. Nothing we can't handle from where we are now though.

So today I found out that in order to fix our issue, we would ultimately have to *delete the repo* thanks github! very cool.

Repo has been deleted (safely) and re-created. Have not yet tested if the issue will occur again, but it shouldn't

So today I looked into an issue in our repo that is quickly becoming a big (?) issue. Basically, GitLFS is for files that don't change and are rather large, like 500MB or more kinda large.

Well, for some reason, ours got filled up with a bunch of ~8kb files when a certain user pushed. Why the files they touched were put in there is a mystery to me, but rn I'm just focused on getting them out of there as it seems to be the source of *another* issue we're facing.

so tonight I showed a teammate how to make a simple sword in blender. I've got a big midterm tomorrow so I'm focusing mostly on that. Here is the sword we modeled together so they could get used to the program

So tonight I checked in with my team. We have some new sound effects & 2 of us did pull requests from our branches into main. Now that they are together, I can get around to "finishing" weapons.

today I hopped on a call again w/ a teammate and helped them out a little bit with interfaces and some other things

today I just helped explain some stuff to my team about the trigger boxes and prepared to teach another team member blender

Worked on the weapons system today while a teammate works on characters (player & enemy)

The ball on the ground is a fireball that fell after being fired from a fireball spell object, which you can't see.
The cylinder with the red sphere trace off of it is the player's sword with the red being the sphere-trace hurtbox. When the weapon objects are attached to the player, their projectile and hurtbox spawnpoints will "move" to match the crosshair.

I'm trying to make everything in here as modular and intuitive as I can so my teammates have an easy time figuring them out.

So today I made our game some super versatile trigger boxes and an activation interface! Then tonight I worked with one of my team members to make sure git branches were working correctly & to get practice on how to push and all of that. They didn't have github desktop installed, so we got that set up for them as well.

We've both made new branches now and are going to start working simultaneously.

The Lich Hand

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