Week 10: Gun Upgrade System

This week's work consisted of creating the gun upgrade system. My initial design ideas from the pre-production phase were quite small as I didn't know exactly what I wanted from the system, just that I wanted a way for the player to upgrade their guns from progressing inside the game.

At this stage of the project, I didn't want to set myself a huge goal that wouldn't be attainable as I still have lots of other aspects of the project that I would like to attend to with a greater level of polish. With this in mind, I started coming up with some ideas for what the actual system would be.

I wanted to incorporate the underground tomb area into the upgrade system by having this area initially locked off to the player. Upon completing specific gameplay events, the player is then able to gain access to the underground tomb area, subsequently granting access to the upgrade altar. For the actual upgrades, I wanted to have 2 functions. The first being just a direct upgrade from the currently equipped weapon. For example, the player can spend an amount of points to gain the upgraded variant of their gun. This would give them more damage and more ammo. This is a simple system as the player is simply rewarded for spending their hard-earned points and in turn progresses their player power. For the next part of the system, I wanted to give the player some ownership on what their weapon does by giving them some different options. At the upgrade altar, if the player has an upgraded weapon, they can apply an 'attunement' the gun. This will give it an extra bonus that will help deal extra damage in several different ways. Again during my pre-production phase I had some ideas in the back of my mind that I would like to try and do but they had to be changed once I started developing the system while keeping the remaining time of the project in mind.

Full Breakdown of the upgrade process in game:

1. Acquire each soul orb from completing the 'soul' event in each main sector of the level. (Inner Temple, Sun Temple, Moon Temple, God Temple)

2. Once all soul orbs have been acquired. Take them back to the spawn room to start the 'soul convergence' event. (Once completed, the doors to the underground tomb area will open)

3. Find the upgrade altar and spend points to upgrade weapon.

4. Select attunement from the upgrade altar by interacting with each specific soul orb.

Stage 1 - Soul Orb Events

Each main section of the map (Total of 4) has a soul orb corresponding to the theme of the area. For example, the god temple area has the god soul orb.

The player will need to kill a certain amount of zombies near the orb in order to charge it up.

Once the orb has been charged up it can then be picked up. To visually show the orbs charging up I'm using a free asset from the unreal marketplace, the Dynamic Orb system by Master Dinochan. This pack has lots of really cool functionality built in and it gave me lots of different ideas when I was playing around with it. In the case of my project, when a zombie is killed within the range of a soul orb it will release a dynamic orb from the zombie which will shoot out and dynamically track to a desired actor that has the component. This allowed me to visually show the orbs charging up from getting kills within the correct context.

Stage 2 - Soul Orb Convergence Event

The convergence event takes the souls from each collected orb and fuses them together with the master orb that is in the center of the spawn area from the start of the game. Once each soul orb has been filled and collected, the player can start the convergence event in the spawn room. This event is the same as the previous stage however it requires more kills than the previous individual orbs. Once this stage is completed the tomb doors in each section of the map will open up. These doors will be permanently open form that point onwards during the game.

Stage 3 - Find and use the altar

Now that the player has access to the underground tomb area they can explore the inner chamber which has the altar in the center as well as other side rooms and passages.

The second stage of the upgrade system:

While the first stage of the upgrade system was fairly straightforward, the next stage would prove quite difficult for a specific reason. The attunement system that I ended up with gives the gun the ability to apply a status effect and each effect is themed based on the area the orb came from. For example, the sun orb will apply a fire attunement which deals a burning fire damage over time effect to an enemy

At the time of writing this, they apply a stack of the status effect and have a max amount of stacks depending on the specific status effect. They will periodically tick for an amount of damage and will then be removed after a specific amount of time. For example, the burn effect can have a max stack of 3, will last for 10 seconds and tick for an amount of damage every 2 seconds. I created a total of 4 different status effects which are each themed on each section of the level, (Burn, Chill, Poison and Blight)

The main reason I consider this system difficult to develop was due to it needing to be integrated with the other systems that I have already created for the game such as the gun and health systems. I can't simply make a new system and hook it up and it works right out of the box. Some better planning at the start of the project may have meant that I didn't end up as limited in what I could do. During the development of the status effect system, I found some new methods and techniques that should help me build more scaleable systems in the future.

I started with some prototype systems that didn't really work out very well so I looked at some other methods online. I found a really robust system that makes use of the gameplay tag feature within Unreal Engine. This system would have worked perfectly for my project but it would have needed to be rebuilt from the ground up or used from the start of the project otherwise it would take far too much time in order to convert my entire game to use it. I do wish that I had started with the gameplay tag system as it would have allowed me to have a much more robust system that can scale with new sub-systems very easily. In the end, I expanded my health component to inhabit the status effect logic which does work to a certain degree but doesn't leave much room to scale into a larger system. While I do have plans and further ideas to take the gun upgrade system further, I am happy with its current state so I'm going to move on to other aspects that need attention and possibly come back to flesh it out where I can depending on available time.