Star Wars Arena

All of the programming for the game was carried out on my own while the assets for the player model, enemy model and environment models such as the trees were imported through different websites and stores. All the assets that were used for the game can be found within the project folder.

Implemented Mechanics

Combo Attacks

The animations for the attacks were acquired from the Epic Marketplace and were designed to be used one after each other. To be able to have the player perform these attacks in order, a counter was used along with an array that stores the attack animations. Every time the player presses the left mouse button, the counter is increased starting from 0 and going up to 3. The counter variable is used for the array index to obtain the correct animation to be played. 

"Anim Notify" was also used for the combo attacks to be able to have the following animation in the combo attack sequence to be played at the right time and not cutting of the current animation prematurely.

Dashing

To be able to dash, the player direction is used as the index of the array that is storing the dashing animations. To achieve this, the player direction is firstly divided by 45, this is then rounded to the nearest whole number and then increased by 4. This changes the angle the player was facing from numbers between -180 and 180 to 0 - 8. The animations for dashing can then be placed in the correct order within the array and have the new number signifying which way the player was facing match the array index for the appropriate animation. The appropriate animation is then played with root motion to allow the player to dash.

Lightsaber blocking

Firstly, to have the player's model appearing to be blocking, an "anim montage" is looped for the top half of the body where the lightsaber is held up in a blocking position while the lower half of the body uses a "blendspace" with walking animations to be able to have the player appear to be walking forwards, back, left and right.

After getting the animations sorted out, to determine whether to block a blaster shot or not, the dot product is used between the player's forward vector and the forward vector from the enemy that took the shoot. If the result of the dot product is within a specified range, then the shot is considered to have be blocked which deletes the projectile. If the shot is outside of the chosen parameters, the player has their health reduced along with the bullet projectile being deleted.

Initially, this calculation was done using the players' forward vector and the projectile's forward vector, however, when the player is up close to the enemy, the blast would be angled and therefore be registered as a hit when it should be blocked. Instead, the forward vector that is used is from the enemy that took the shot. This results in more accurate blocking.

Enemy AI

To create the enemy AI, the behaviour tree and blackboard were used together. This is a relatively simple AI system with the enemy firstly having to check if it is alive, followed by a check to see whether it is within a certain distance away from the player. If the enemy is too far away from the player, it moves towards them with the exact coordinates for where it needs to move to being updated regularly as the player is able to move around. 

Once the enemy is within a certain distance of the player, the AI checks to see whether it is within a closer distance to determine whether it is close enough to melee. If the AI is not close enough to melee the player but too close to move towards the player, the enemy holds their ground and keeps firing at the player until either the player moves too far away from, or the player moves into the range that the enemy can melee.

One of the first things that I would work on to take this game further would be to add a new enemy type which would add more variety to the game as the player would have to deal with different enemy types. However, while making this game, trying to find models with rigging that matched the game world was hard and therefore, to be able to add new enemies, I would have to learn new skills such as modelling to be able to adjust models and rig them to be able to make them usable for my game.

The second area I would like to improve would be the combo attacks. Even though I am proud to be able to make them work as this was my first time trying this, this can be improved to create a smoother transition from one attack to another and possibly add other attack combos to add more variety to the attacks.