Welcome to my seventeenth diary entry for my game Knight Veil. This week i set out to Unreal Engine Five to build all the basic components needed for my game. If I can do this correctly I won’t have to deal with these things later on in the development of the game allowing me to focus on more complex matters.

I worked on mechanics such as running, walking, jumping crouching, stamina and health. It is very important that the player feels like he has control and freedom in the game so giving them as many options as possible was neccasssary.

The biggest challenge this week was repetition although these mechanics are different they didn’t offer any creative design and challenge making it feel like tedious boring work. However, I understand this is a necessary part of the game and I cannot continue into next week without completing it. The only real challenge was the stamina bar because there was a bug that I didn’t understand at first. The player could have infinite stamina if they tried to run again without having it fully regenerate. After a while, however, I solved this problem which is vital because the combat is dependent on stamina, and allowing the player to infinitely spam the attack button with no consequences is bad design.

A mechanic that cannot be considered a soul’s game is the roll. This was hard to polish because I needed good animations and to be set up in a way to behave differently depending on the player's circumstances. Ultimately I was able to program a flexible system for it however I’m mostly proud of the player skill and choice that went into this. Giving the player two ways to roll. First, you can roll in any direction giving you iframes. The other is if you don’t move you leap back making it a lot more faster and useful depending on the combat situation.

Overall I’m happy with the fast progress made this week, this was due to me neglecting a lot of the GDD written design work however it’s paying off and will continue putting the playable game first.