Our First Playtest & Ripples

Immunity Wars

This week was our first playtest. To prepare for I did a ton of bug fixing and general housekeeping. Plus I also did a small amount of balancing to make the game at least a little fun. Overall the playtest went really well. In it, we had two versions of the game that explored different directions the same ideas could be taken. One made by me focused on a larger scale and had no pathfinding. The other version was made by our designer/producer which had an energy/action point system and a much smaller scale. Both versions were made using the same code; however, they played quite differently.

Through the playtest, we got a lot of good feedback, on things ranging from accidental ability uses to the energy system slowing the game down too much. Going forward we plan to remove the energy system and have a larger scale like my version, but have level design and pathfinding like the other version.

Misc. Side Projects

After the playtest I wanted a quick break from Immunity Wars so I decided to start on a little game idea (with no intention of finishing it). For it, I made a water material with material-based ripples, that used Niagara as a middleman between Blueprints and materials. The Niagara system would be passed an array of ripples and their radii and then draw them onto a render target using custom HLSL that ran on the GPU. The render target would then be used by the material as a height map.

I used Niagara to run the HLSL code as it can be passed arrays from Blueprints. I could have instead used a second render target that would act like an array that could be read by HLSL code in a material; however, I wanted to experiment since I hadn't had a chance to mess with Niagara node graphs before.

Here is most of the code for the ripples: