Angel Regalado

Setup the join/leave functionality of the local multiplayer lobby.

Added a blueprint to handle multiple player input in menus.

Added position/direction indicators to the players in the form of decals.

Added a modular player HUD that could be used for each of the on-screen characters (up to 4).

Created a custom Game Instance blueprint to store data between levels.

Modified the lobby to include a "lock in" system for players to confirm their character choice.

Modified the lobby to function with UI animations (4 possible players with 4 possible characters, a countdown for the game to start).

Setup data assets in the Game Instance and hooked up the game modes to pull from them to update the player characters (getting the character color/mesh/anim blueprint/etc).

Refactored the player HUD to match new design requirements.

Polished the player HUD to work identically and efficiently with both game modes.

We setup 4 individual player pawns that would create their own player controller that had no visible components and was only responsible for listening for player inputs.

The lobby used Interfaces with a player ID input to trigger each character select widget to update the UI.

I used a custom GameInstance blueprint that would store the data (selected character/player ID/score) and could be called from any other blueprint to retrieve the data.

Later it was requested to add a "lock in" feature that added the player HUD to the lobby to make it more clear to players which HUD belonged to them.

Previously the character selection had two states (connected/disconnected) but two more states were added (locked in/not locked in). I managed to get it working by adding an additional check for the states without having to redesign the blueprint.

Designers wanted a HUD widget that could be used for each of the game modes (total of 2).

The other programmers setup their game modes differently so the HUD had to be modular enough to use in different situations.

The HUDs get "initialized" at the start of the level with a few values passed in: which player is using this HUD element, which character image/color to use, and the character controller which contains event dispatchers that the HUD would bind to for updates.

Both game modes needed animations for: first place and losing points.

The first place animation is triggered by the parent widget which calculates who has the highest score.

The lose points animation is triggered by the player controller's event dispatcher.

Learning how to use Blueprints.
This project was my first experience with visual scripting and Unreal Blueprints. While I enjoy traditional scripting there were aspects of visual scripting I enjoyed - particularly how easy it is to follow the path of the code.
After a weekend of making an experimental project and with the help of more experienced teammates this challenge was overcome within the first couple of weeks.

Working with other people's code and writing code that was easy for others to work with.
Everyone made their blueprints slightly differently which added complexity to the project. I focused on abstracting my code and including few dependencies which made it easy to manage when: design changes were made, other blueprints were modified and later features were implemented.

For the shooter sandbox: got to learn with gun mechanics and health systems.

For the mech sandbox: learned about vehicle piloting simulation and the importance of visual/haptic/audio feedback in VR.

First time doing procedural generation.

Used a Voronoi fill algorithm to determine territories.

Later modified it to work on a hex grid with 3D meshes.

Puzzle pieces are randomly generated every time.

The puzzle can have a wide variety of total pieces

If I were to continue this project I'd like to try making 3D puzzle pieces to experiment with mesh generation.

Grid based city building controller. Taught me how to handle grid selection in different situations.

First attempt to do city building in Unreal.