A Writer's journey into game development

After playing with Unreal Engine, it is time to get back to my work with Unity3D. Had a couple of projects abandoned and decided to make a little offensive on issues that I thought  did not know how to solve, but seems that I had some extra power up hidden somewhere. I am glad to say that at last I implemented the foundation of weapon reloading. Just the foundations, but at least it is there. I need some more work on the inventory system, to unify duplicated code, and additional checkings like if the right caliber exists, which then will lead to other issues like same caliber/different damage type ammo. Also I added some more info to trade window, but still have to implement item comparison, same as in player inventory window. I implemented another basic quest, which in turn, required to deal with an old pending issue: events, like NPC dying.  My first approach was correct, but the implementation was totally wrong. Adding this quest needed some additions to dialog system,...

A couple of days ago I managed to make my first working Blueprint script. Well, it is not finished, because I took the wrong approach, but at least I found how to handle input and react to key press/release events. Not too difficult, it just takes some time to watch the official tutorials. In the end,  a Blueprint class and a C++ class are almost the same. You can put together some components and code, that's all. Blueprint tries to help by being context sensitive and it is supposed to allow quick prototyping, if you are an expert, of course. One of the problems I found, besides my lack of patience, was that unlike Unity3D, where you start a project from scratch, Unreal Engine tries to provide you some base template to start. That requires changing some stuff in the GameMode class if you want to change how the camera is managed, for example. It is possible to avoid using the game framework, but I'm still far from that skill level. So, I'm quite pleased with my progre...

The prototype is under a storm of changes lately. Yesterday I spent some time trying to figure out the origin of some bugs in the AI code. Lot of time actually, because I lost one hour looking at the wrong line. But now, after moving some code to the Awake() function, and unifying some initializations that were repeated, I fixed a lot of weird errors I had. Also, I found some logical errors, preventing the NPC from properly getting into weapon's range. Today I plan to implement separate functions to deal with each combat mode, to unclutter the Combat state. Also, I have to study the new Pluggable AI videos posted in Unity's Youtube channel. Maybe I can get some ideas to implement some way to differentiate the AI for each NPC. The other bunch of changes deal with the process of building character mesh and equip/unequip items like armors. Currently it is a hughe mess with weird problems like incomplete characters, or complete ones that become incomplete if I close and the op...