Margin Notes 11 : Bringing The Pieces Together
- Daniel Langley
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
I haven’t had a chance to post a Margin Notes in a while, so I just wanted to start off by saying thank you for your patience and waiting for this latest update on ASSIAH and all the things we’ve been building and putting together behind the scenes. The mechanics detailed in Margin Notes 9 (read more here) have been tuned up a bit, tightening up the gameplay experience. Additionally all the textured weapons have been implemented in engine including behavior, rigging, and animation as well as having custom muzzle flash particle systems.
Also, The Way To Life is currently 50% off during the Steam Summer Sale, so if you haven't picked up a copy of our first game now is the perfect time to do so. Any purchases of the game is appreciated immensely! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3291900/The_Way_To_Life/
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
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~ HEADS UP ~
One of the major changes has been the Heads Up Display (HUD) that you’ll see in game. These assets are still a work in progress but as you can see below the layout and style of the HUD has been refined quite a bit.
Weapon icon placement has been adjusted.
Grenade icons have been added.
Ammo counter has been adjusted with custom visuals per gun.
Custom crosshairs have been added for each gun.
Health Bar has been adjusted to better represent health amount.
Decal overlay has been added.
2D helmet border replaced with 3D helmet mesh.
Interaction text added
Critical Message text added
All these things add up to a better HUD experience with more readability and quick access to information for the player. I should mention that all of these assets are still in a temporary state and are subject to change in the future. There are a couple more HUD elements that need to be added before I consider the HUD feature complete but this is a big step forward in both visuals and functionality.
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~ IT LIVES! IT LIVES!!! ~
The next major thing I worked on was getting all the guns in the engine and functioning properly. This ended up being a massive task as during the process of getting the weapons in the engine I unveiled a chain reaction of bugs and poor programming in my code. So, it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped, but in the end the entire process resulted in fixing some amateur code I’d put together as well as getting things functioning the way I wanted.
:: Ammo System ::
First of all, the Ammo System bugged out on me again. As it turns out this system is way more complicated than it should be (pretty much entirely because I made it way more complicated than it should be) and as a result trying to do basically anything is a real pain. The big hurdle this time was getting the ammo pick ups to communicate properly with the weapon in the players secondary slot and giving them ammo for the gun that they don’t currently have equipped but do have on their person.
This involved all kinds of trial and error and at the end of the day I needed to make two boolean check chains so that the ammo pick ups could detect which gun was in either slot of the players inventory, detect how much ammo the weapon has against how much it needs, and to distribute ammo appropriately.
It was a massive headache. But it works now and you can walk over ammo for any gun and collect it and that ammo will be present in your weapon when you equip it. Like I said, way more complicated than it needed to be.
:: Grenade System ::
Similar to the ammo system, the grenade system needed its own inventory so that the player could pick up multiple types of grenades and have them on demand. Unlike the ammo system I didn’t over complicate this by burning the inventory on an instanced asset and just placed the entire grenade inventory on the player character.
The grenade system basically lets you pick up and throw any grenade that you have in your inventory. The tricky wizard of oz stuff is that the grenades need to automatically swap to whatever grenade you have in your inventory when you press the throw button and update the HUD accordingly.
All of this is in action now and works wonderfully making for a really great feeling grenade system that I’m honestly super happy with. The only thing I need to adjust is that when you throw the grenade it doesn’t throw from the hand, but rather spawn from the center of the camera and is offset by a vector calculation that I didn’t set up correctly. This creates variation on the spawn location of the grenade when thrown and that needs to be fixed before I can call it done.
:: Animations and Muzzle Flash ::
The next step in everything was adding a bunch of animations to make the guns feel not terrible to look at when shooting them. This meant I needed to rig the weapons, create a control rig for them, animate them, and implement the animation in the engine. This process included making the melee animations for each weapon and building a melee system as a whole.
I considered not having a melee system and just focusing on shooting but after some playing around like that it quickly became obvious to me that adding melee would be necessary. So I quickly built a rudimentary melee system that distributes damage when the melee is activated and added animations to that too. Below is a video showing all the weapon animations in the game so far.
Note: Most of these are close to finished but some are still in the process of being polished.
All of the rigging and animating was done in Unreal Engine 5 which is pretty nifty in my opinion. You can build a skeleton, apply skin weights, and build a control rig for animating all within Unreal and it’s actually pretty straight forward.
The rigging and skin weight painting process is very similar to Maya’s workflow, and for animating I just did frame by frame animation starting with the major poses, adjusting timing, then key framing in-betweens as needed.
I’m not an animator by any means, so this whole process was quite a bit of new information for me and took a little getting used to. At the end of the day though all the weapons now animate and have their own personality when in action.
Speaking of weapon personality, part of that personality absolutely comes out through the muzzle flash. Another work flow that I previously had zero experience with is particle systems. I had no idea how they worked or how to even begin making them. Finally, after a few tutorials and reading some documentation I was able to put together some rudimentary muzzle flashes for each gun. Eventually I got back around to turning those and adding a lot more custom visuals changing the shape and colors of each one to better suit the weapon they were associated with. There are still a few that I plan on changing.
:: Flashlight ::
On a slightly less major change, the flashlight saw a little update. I changed out the decal to make it match SOLDR’s visor shape more as well as added a subtle white vignette to the edges of the screen when it’s toggled on to show that the light is coming from the visor itself. I also added a HUD element showing the flashlights battery life in the top right under the health bar.
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~ A MANI PEDI FOR SOLDR ~
Last, but certainly not least, SOLDR got a bit of a make over. I was really happy with his old look but there was something about it that didn’t quite feel distinct enough. He was too round and didn’t have a bold enough silhouette so I wanted to rework some parts of his armor. After some tinkering around in Maya I was able to add some parts to his character mesh, these little details added a lot of depth to his overall form and gave him the flair that I felt like he was missing.
With a reworked mesh, however, comes a slew of other reworks that needed to be addressed. So, SOLDR officially got the entire treatment from head to toe.
New character mesh.
New UV’s unwrapped.
New and more detailed textures.
New full body rig.
New arms only rig.
All this leads to the upgraded SOLDR who will be the final version for the game.
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~ STEAM SUMMER SALE ~
One final mention of The Way To Life being on sale for the duration of the Steam Summer Sale. You can pick up a copy of Book 27 Games first game for 50% off until July 10th when the sale will end. Follow this link to pick up a copy of The Way To Life! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3291900/The_Way_To_Life/
Every purchase of The Way To Life helps fund Book 27 Games and ASSIAH as well as our other projects. Thank you to everyone who's already picked up a copy!
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Thanks for reading this month’s Margin Notes and thank you again for your patience!
Development on ASSIAH goes on and every day we get one step closer to that final build. Development plans for next month include finalizing weapon animations, ironing out the last few bugs in the weapon system, and beginning on getting the enemy NPC behavior built into the game.
Follow Book 27 Games on Twitter for weekly lore updates every Friday as well as midweek development updates. All recent lore from this month has been added to the Archives page so please enjoy catching up on all the latest ASSIAH lore there or on Twitter.
You can sign up for email notifications whenever a new Margin Notes post goes live via the home page!
Cheers!
-DannyMac
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