Blog
Our game development journey
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Kopi is going to Yorkshire
We are super pleased to announce that we’re going to be attending and demoing at the GaYaMo #22 event in Tileyard North on 23rd May. So, we will be bringing the latest and greatest build of Kopi for everyone to enjoy. Prepare yourselves for lots of organised chaos and fun!…
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TWWL 1
As an introduction to the series–we will summarise things that we found useful in one week of game development; think of this as a collection of tips and tricks, a collection of mistakes made (so you don’t have to repeat them), a collection of our development patterns (so you can…
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Command-line builds
In the early days of working on our game, after the honeymoon phase of playing with tutorials, we suddenly remembered our days of software engineering, where we needed repeatable builds and tests. And by repeatable, I don’t mean clicking the run button in the IDE, clicking on the Unreal Editor…
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Diagnosing game crashes
When doing user testing, there will be surprises. The players will do things you people would never believe; and there is a small, but insignificant chance that this will result in the game crashing. Not the nice kind of crash with an error message and some default action, but the…
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Game saves (2) and concepts
In the last post, we explored the low-level USaveGame objects, including a developer quality of life mechanism to support saving and loading of these objects. But this all feels like too much manual work. You have seen these UPROPERTY(SaveGame) specifiers, and the Unreal build tool does not complain if you…
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Game saves (1) and concepts
In the good old days, games were proper gamers; to play a game, one had to first find the tape, then fiddle with the play and fast-forward buttons to. If you wanted to finish a game, you had better have a whole day, there were no saves. The times have…
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Constructor parameters
Constructor parameters What do we mean constructor parameters? Surely, they are exactly what the title says, what else is there to discuss? You need one or two things? Well, add or or two constructor parameters. Ten things? Ten constructor parameters for you. Now, one or two constructor parameters are definitely…
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Diagnosing an elusive build problem
Diagnosing an elusive build problem After a day of pair programming, we ended up with a lot of new code and blueprints in our project. We submitted all code to our VCS, and waited for the inevitable “OK” from the build automation. Sadly, it never came; instead, we went from…
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Generic BP Nodes
Generic BP Nodes Let’s say you wanted to implement a Blueprint node that can return the first element of a list (if the list is non-empty), with two exec pins for valid and invalid, very similar to say the cast node. Tackling first the valid and invalid exec pins, we…
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Multiple controllers and UI
Multiple controllers and UI In addition to network multiplayer, our game needed local couch mode multiplayer, too. It is just so much fine to grab a game controller and have a go with one’s friends. The challenge was how to use the game controllers to drive the user interface. One…