Slow days. Figuring out my portolio
Been a slow couple of days recently while I’ve been playing around to setup the website to be as representable as possible. I started off taking inspirations from other students on how they did theirs. My issue has always been the amount of text content and deep explanation that went into their portfolios. I understand that one wants to explain the whole thought process and roadmap from start to finish. So I was a bit skeptical after finishing my first portfolio page for my first project I worked on (which wasn’t an ambitious project since I was very novice in Unity). So I just started feeling a big “Ugh” feeling if I’d have to put as much effort in composing a page for my more ambitious projects.
So I instead contacted a person from the industry and asked if I could ask some questions about their view on portfolios and if I later could send it to them for them to give feedback to me. Which they happily agreed to! And I got some good tips and confirmation about what is important and what is good things to add.
But eventually I squeeze in some time to research, try out and implement some stuff into the side project.
First version of Adjust Health Blueprint inside of the Actor Component for my Health System.
There is probably better way to implement something that can both adjust both Health Taken and Health Given in the same event. I’ll figure that our further down the road. This will do fine for now.
Building the right Health System
Something that I really wish to be able to automatically finish in 5 minute tops whenever I start with a new project is to have a solid health system in place. So that is why I did spend some time on these couple of days to research. The health system it self is very basic and easy to do. What I struggled with though was to try to implement a UI that works with the new discovery I found in this video. It’s from the same person that I linked in a previous post. The reason why I wanted to implement this method is to try to make everything as efficient as possible. So instead of binding the percentage of the fill bar in the widget of the UI, which apparently checks for an update on every frame, you create an Event Dispatcher that you can call on whenever your health is updated.
This gave me a small headache at first as well since I wanted to use an Actor Component for the Health System to be able to utilize it for not only the player character, but also for enemies and possibly environmental object. I thought I had to do some dark voodoo magic to be able to refer the component after Casting from the player Blueprint, but it could easily be referred to from the “As BP First Person Character” output. The famous “Ahaaa” moment is both annoying and satisfying.
The next step will probably be to create a target dummy and make the cards be able to affect or deal damage to them. Exciting stuff!