Week 1: Player Controller & Gun Framework Mechanics

For the first week of development, I started with the most important aspects. The player character, the locomotion mechanics, camera position, and hooking up the guns to the player. I needed to get this done first as this is what the player will see 100% of the time when playing the game. I need to make sure that the camera is set to the correct position on the player model before doing anything else. This means that I won't need to change the camera mid-way through development and risk things not looking correct. By setting up the camera first it means that I can develop the rest of the game through that viewport of the player.

I started by first updating the character model from the template Unreal Mannequin. I used a free character model that is on the Unreal Engine Marketplace.

I chose this model because I felt that it fit the narrative and aesthetic that I'm going for with the project. It was also already rigged to the Unreal Skeletons which meant that I could use the FPS animation starter pack by Epic, with the character model. The model is also free which is always a bonus.

The character model also came in different versions. the main one for me is a headless model. This was essential as I would need to remove the head to avoid clipping issues with the camera due to how I have created the first-person perspective.

I have opted to use a true first-person perspective. This means that from the player's perspective, they can see their legs and body. I chose this method as I believe it adds to the immersion because the player begins to feel more connected to their character. This involves using a full-body skeletal mesh and then positioning the camera to mimic a first-person perspective.

So once I was happy with the camera and the player model, I started with the locomotion mechanics. I'm using the character movement component from the third-person template which means a lot of the mechanics are already set up and just need some extra logic, tweaking, and animations. My first task was to finish the walking. The default walking is set up using a blend space which basically mushes different animations together depending on the speed and direction the character is moving. I used a similar setup to achieve the basic locomotion. I added forward, backward, left, and right movements, and depending on where the character moves it will blend between them.

I only needed the blend space for the legs because I blended the blend space with other animations for the arms which would be linked to the guns which I will discuss later.

I moved onto jumping. Again I used jumping and falling animations from the animation starter pack and then blended them from the torso up to make sure the gun animations would still be playing at all times. I didn't need to do too much to the base jumping that was already set up. I added in some functions that will disable the sprinting and crouching when a jump input is made. This results in the player landing in a standing position as opposed to still crouching or sprinting which was the desired outcome.

I then set up the crouching in a similar way to the walking. I created another blend space in the same way as the walking but used crouching animations. I then used the built-in crouching functions and lined up the height of the capsule when crouching to make it so the player can walk underneath objects. However, at this point, the player can 'uncrouch' while underneath an object and then get themselves stuck so that is something I will need to look into.

Sprinting took a little more to get working as intended. I set up the animations which still needs tweaking but I will come back to that later as it's only a single animation that I'm using for everything. The initial logic to make the character sprint was simple I just increased the movement speed when the input was triggered and made sure the correct animation plays based on that input. However, I needed to balance the mechanic. I can't have the player be able to infinitely sprint otherwise it would be pretty easy to run away from things. I implemented stamina that will drain when the sprint action is in progress. Once the stamina hits 0 it will stop sprinting and go back to walking. After a brief delay, it will recharge back to full and allow the player to sprint again. I needed to make sure that if the player stopped sprinting with say half stamina remaining and then started sprinting again, the draining and recharging of stamina would work correctly. The stamina amount and delays for the recharge will be something that I revisit once I have created the AI for the game to ensure that it's balanced.

Now that I had the locomotion and the different basic states that the player can do, set up it was time to set it all up in the Animation Blueprint for the player character. To tell the AnimBP what the player is doing or what weapon they have, I used a blueprint interface. I then created functions inside the player character which will feed variables from the player character into it and then can update the AnimBP. This worked out really well and allowed me to easily change the animations based on the current state of the player.

Now for the aspect that used the bulk of my time this week, setting up the idle and aim-down sight animations for all the guns. I created a static pose for the idle animation for each gun which would then have some procedural hand sway code added to them to make them move. I did it this way because not every gun is held in the same way or same position. Once I had the hand and the gun model in the right place on the screen I duplicated that animation and then repositioned the hands to be in the ADS position. This was a very tedious process as I am by no means an animator and getting the iron sights of every gun lined up correctly and at the correct distance took up a lot of time. This means that each gun has 2 separate animations, 1 for idle and 1 for aiming. I have an Enum with every gun inside of it. I used this to tell the Anim BP which gun the player is currently holding. This will then change the state machine that is being used to whichever gun is currently selected. This results in each gun having its own state machine. Im sure there are more efficient methods of doing this however this is what I found to work for my project.

I am really happy with the way the animations for the guns have ended up. My next steps will be adding weapon-swapping animations. Making a player inventory so the player can only carry 2 guns at a time with the ability to change the guns they have for those 2 slots. Next week I will spend my time researching and developing the AI for the zombies and making it so the player can attack them and vice versa.