Shutdown

Devlog

• The Finally
  April 27, 2023 by Boomishhe

  As the last month of the game, there wasn't much left to do such things as music, sounds, effects, etc... And most of the time was spent focusing on playtesting the game and making sure that everythin... Continue reading
• Post Mortem Video
  April 27, 2023 by Vrixic

  So this whole month of development for us has been very slow as we are pretty much done with the game, only thing left for us to do was polish and give more player feedback. We have been fixing minor... Continue reading
• Fixing issue with Hud not being valid
  April 27, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: This week we spent a lot of time playtesting and doing small fixes for issues we found. One of these small issues was found when loading in from the main menu into the game. I noticed that as... Continue reading

  
• Finalization of Gameplay
  April 27, 2023 by ekicks0#Developer, #Games

  Author: Ethan Ortega As the final week of production is underway the team and I have not encountered issues that were overbearingly challenging. The biggest portion of the time came from fine-tuning a... Continue reading
• Circuit Puzzle Changes
  April 27, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: One of the final touches this week was adjusting the circuit puzzle for each of the different times it was used. There was an issue however where the path for the pu... Continue reading
• Touching Up Sounds
  April 22, 2023 by mditcharo

  Author: Myles Ditcharo With most of the hard work done already, the others and I have been working on the smaller details. These details include music, sound effects, visuals, etc. On my end, I have b... Continue reading
• Level Music
  April 22, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Problem: These last few weeks my team and I have been just trying to polish up the game. This week I have mostly been adding in new sound and audio. I was working on the le... Continue reading
• Getting people to play the game
  April 21, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Problem: for our completion of the game I've chosen a path to find out if the level design was understandable and if all of the puzzles felt fun and progressively hard. The main problem was to get som... Continue reading
• Tuning the Lighting in Level 3
  April 21, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: Throughout the many iterations of level 3 lighting has been something that I have consistently struggled with and tweaked. As we approached the end of our polish phase of development, I knew... Continue reading

  
• Static Mesh Mass Scale
  April 21, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #Developer

  Author - Ethan Ortega Problem: In last week's blog post I dove into the physics issue that allowed the player to be launched when colliding with a collectible with physics. After fixing that issue, an... Continue reading

  
• Does the game feel fun?
  April 13, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Problem: One of the issues I've faced was finding out how to see if the game feels good and fun. I've been playtesting for quite a while and it's somewhat difficult. The main question was to understan... Continue reading

  
• Craig Swipe Attack
  April 13, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: While I was implementing Craig's animations, I needed to implement the swipe attack animation. The swipe animation was pretty easy to implement overall. However, the... Continue reading
• Physics Launching the Player
  April 13, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #Developer

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem: In level 2 the teddy bear puzzle has a bow that the player must collect. In order to get the bow within the player's reach you must hack a device, complete the puzzle and... Continue reading

  
• Creating a Flashlight for Z4CH
  April 13, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: As we began adding in more lighting to our game, we began to notice just how dark certain areas were. This was especially prominent in the vents in Level 3. However, we hit a wall when it cam... Continue reading

  
• Mantle Animation
  April 13, 2023 by Vrixic##gamedev

  One of the things that I postponed for a long time was mantle animation. We finally got someone to create a mantle animation for us! But there was one thing that was weird about how it was exported/cr... Continue reading

  
• Craig Inverse Kinematics
  April 06, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: For our boss fight we needed the boss to attack an area on the ground. We already had the boss attacking the area but we did not have the animations implemented for... Continue reading
• Polish, Polish, and More Polish
  April 06, 2023 by Vrixic##gamedev, ##game

  Last month of development, and we are finally on the stage of polishing our game, meaning we're done with adding any new mechanics, systems, or features. I have been mostly just polishing things, fixi... Continue reading

  
• Game feel and playthrough
  April 06, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Problem: The issue that I have faced was a lack of experience testing a game because I know that I have to test everything to make whoever is willing to play enjoy the experience. And one of the first... Continue reading

  
• Checkpoint Not Rotating
  April 06, 2023 by mditcharo

  AUTHOR: Myles Ditcharo ISSUE: When loading into a checkpoint, the players rotation would not be set properly. This caused him to be looking in a random direction after spawning, which lead to confusio... Continue reading

  
• Audio Overlapping
  April 06, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #Developer

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem: When doing the piano puzzle there was an issue where the key audio and fail audio would play at the same time. When you stepped on the wrong key it would first play the a... Continue reading

  
• Leading the player through Level 3
  April 06, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: As we began to hold more play test sessions, I began to notice a pattern of people not knowing where to go at various places in Level 3. Especially when trying to find out how to get to the i... Continue reading

  
• Cinematics
  March 25, 2023 by Vrixic##cinematics, ##gamedev

  So the last week of our month 3 development I focused all on cinematics. Adding cinematics in unreal is very easy because of their level sequencing tool, but making them look smooth and clean is the h... Continue reading
• Level 1 Adjustment and lightning changes
  March 24, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Problem: The level didn't seem to be abandoned and needed longer improvement to give more worrying emotions to the player. One of the issues was that the room was too bright f... Continue reading

  
• Issues Saving Scanner State
  March 24, 2023 by ekicks0#Developer, #Games

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem : When loading into the game the meshes that were last scannable were no longer scannable. This was an issue since the scanner is supposed to be a tool when the player is... Continue reading

  
• Creating A Live Camera Feed
  March 24, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: For the maze puzzle in the Dining Hall side room, I wanted to have a live camera feed. This feed would show the maze from a top down perspective on a screen connected to the wall in the room... Continue reading

  
• Frame Rate Drops with Blender Attack
  March 24, 2023 by mditcharo

  AUTHOR: Myles Ditcharo ISSUE: During the blender attack of the Craig boss fight, the frame rate would drop incredibly low; however, the problem was that the frame rate would only start to drop after t... Continue reading
• New Targeting for Boss
  March 18, 2023 by mditcharo

  AUTHOR: MYLES DITCHARO ISSUE: Our boss had an issue where when using his chop attack in phase one, he would sometimes send a hitbox off the stage depending on where the player would stand. This was to... Continue reading
• Forklift asset research and bugs
  March 17, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Problem: Upon adding the final assets for the Forklift which was an issue on its own, since we have a forklift work as the lift, but there are no free assets that come separate or animated for me to a... Continue reading
• Creating Rotating Platforms using a Timeline
  March 17, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: As I worked on the Dining Hall Level of Shutdown, I began to feel it was missing something. After talking with my team, I decided that what I needed was a new puzzle for the level. To fit thi... Continue reading

  
• Grapple Hook Swing Optimal Attach Point
  March 17, 2023 by Vrixic##gamedev, #unreal, #game, #bug, #problem

  The grapple hook mechanic has a significant impact on the gameplay of our game. I have been polishing it every chance I get, and am always thinking about ways to make it better. As it currently stood,... Continue reading
• Boss Phase Transition Bug
  March 17, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: While we were play testing a build of the game, a few of my team members noticed a bug with the boss fight transitions. Whenever the boss would try to knock the play... Continue reading
• Issue Respawning Actors in the Correct Order
  March 17, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #Developer

  Author- Ethan Ortega Problem: In level 2 there is a cooking station puzzle that spawns different actors when you hit a selected button. When the puzzle was completed I was attempting to save the actor... Continue reading

  
• Issue with rendering when look at a lot of objects
  March 12, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Issue: The problem was noticed on the second day after level 1 was complete and the fact when you look at the shelf there was a huge FPS drop I looked at the stats for unreal... Continue reading

  
• Creating a Macro Library
  March 11, 2023 by mditcharo

  Author - Myles Ditcharo ISSUE: This developer log is going to be a bit unique because the issue spans across multiple actors and blueprints I have worked with. When blueprinting certain things I found... Continue reading
• Unreal UMG and Grapple Niagara Particle System bug fixes
  March 10, 2023 by Vrixic##bugfix, ##gamedev, ##game, ##bug, #unrealengine4, #programming

  Unreal engine is an amazing tool to use, but it does have a hard learning curve. One of the things I wanted to do with the unreal engine is use their UMG system to its true potential. Learning how to... Continue reading

  
• Creating a Anchor Grapple Node
  March 10, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: For Shutdown, one of my tasks this week was to create a grapple node that the player could grapple onto and retract to pull themselves along the floor. I intended to use this anchor in our ve... Continue reading

  
• Issues with Item Popup When Reentering the Game
  March 10, 2023 by ekicks0#Developer, #Games

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem: While refining our teddy bear puzzle to include saving for when it is completed, I noticed when you exited the editor and loaded back in without claiming the teddy bear w... Continue reading

  
• Checkpoints During Boss Fight
  March 10, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: While I was working on the boss fight, I wanted to add checkpoints to the fight so then when you finish a phase, the player would respawn at the next phase if they d... Continue reading
• Footstep Sounds Not Playing on Enemies
  March 07, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: There was a bug that I discovered while playing through our game where the enemies did not make footstep sounds. This was strange because I verified that the enemy f... Continue reading
• Hand Scan Puzzle Finalizing Assets
  March 04, 2023 by Vrixic

  For the past week, I have been trying to finalize many assets in the game, starting with the Hand Scan Puzzle screens. I have finished the main screen. Creating these assets from scratch was a huge pa... Continue reading
• Level 1 has been modified with most of the final assets
  March 04, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Problem: Major problem that I faced was that all of the final assets were too small for our view of the game, so I had to manually resize everything. After that, a big problem... Continue reading

  
• Making a Glass Case open over a timeline
  March 04, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: When putting the Sound Enemies into the Dining Hall level, I wanted it to feel apparent that initially they were not a threat. It wasn't until the player activated the Sound Enemies by reente... Continue reading

  
• Hackable Action Figures Could Activate Their Abilities Through Walls
  March 04, 2023 by ekicks0#Developer, #Games

  Author- Ethan Ortega Problem: When using the hackable action figure you could activate its ability on its target through walls. The way the old implementation was, you could activate its ability as lo... Continue reading

  
• Rumba Enemy Only Moving Between Two Points
  February 23, 2023 by ekicks0#AI, #Developer, #Game

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem : While I was reworking our rumba enemy, Madeline the Maid, I was changing the task that would control her movement. Through the first implementation, I realized there was... Continue reading

  
• Redesigning Level 2's Flow
  February 23, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: As we reached the end of our second month of development, we began to have more and more playtest sessions on Shutdown. As we listened to this feedback, we realized that our game's flow was n... Continue reading

  
• Circuit Puzzle Issue
  February 23, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Issue: While I was working on the circuit puzzle, I was running into many issues. In the puzzle, the goal is to link the wires together to connect the power to the end. I w... Continue reading

  
• Grapple hook inconsistency bug (UE4 Physics)
  February 23, 2023 by Vrixic

  After adding gravity to the grapple hook swing mechanic, the unreal physics system created a bug that was difficult to tackle at first glance. BUG: The Grapple Hook swing changes based on the FPS of t... Continue reading
• Level 1 major adjustments
  February 23, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Problem: The problem was that part with the fan was confusing and seemed annoying to get; hence, you had to complete 75% of the map and then jump down to 35%, and you had to r... Continue reading

  
• Circuit Puzzle Not Working
  February 20, 2023 by CameronEuston

  The Issue: I was working on the circuit puzzle where the player is supposed to connect the wires together to lead power to the goal node. However I was having an issue with this where none of the wire... Continue reading
• Blender Blade Getting Stuck
  February 18, 2023 by mditcharo

  AUTHOR: Myles Ditcharo ISSUE: When making a placeholder mesh for Craig's blender attack, I ran into an issue involving the actor. I had wanted add a spinning blade in the center of the mesh to show th... Continue reading
• Forklift Bug: Going through player..
  February 17, 2023 by Vrixic

  1

  ##bug, ##game

  There were many bugs with the forklift, this one being one of the easier ones to fix. BUG: If the player was initially underneath the forklift, it would go through the player. Tracking: There was no t... Continue reading

  
• Forklift not lifting player properly
  February 17, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Problem: the forklift has been implemented, and it seemed to be working correctly, but once everything came to putting stuff in the game, I had to resize it to make it work pr... Continue reading

  
• Dynamically Displaying Interact and Hacking Text
  February 17, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Problem: While doing playtesting for Shutdown, we consistently heard feedback regarding not knowing what the player could and could not interact with/Hack. In pursuit of giving the player more feedbac... Continue reading

  
• Problem with the Inventory PopUp
  February 17, 2023 by ekicks0#Developer

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem : Initially the popup would display when the player interacted with a collectible but I was reworking it to also display with all inventory items. Through this, the proble... Continue reading
• Reworking the Level Loading System
  February 11, 2023 by mditcharo

  Author: Myles Ditcharo ISSUE: When playing the build, depending on the computer, the build would fail to load the next level. The screen would fade to black and not do anything else. To load the level... Continue reading

  
• Issue with AI Sound Perception
  February 11, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Problem I started this week working on the new enemy in our game that would operate purely off of sound. This obviously requires a good enemy perception system to make it f... Continue reading
• Problem with kids cooking station.
  February 10, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Problem: The cooking station puzzle requires the player to click buttons properly to solve it, and one of the issues was despawning actors after spawning into the engine. The... Continue reading

  
• Problem with Hackable Device
  February 10, 2023 by ekicks0##bug, ##gamedev, #DeveloperIssues, ##bugfix

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem: While working with splines, I concluded it could be cool to allow our character to interact and hack something that is moving along a spline. When the player hacks someth... Continue reading

  
• Bug Fixes In Mantle and Hacking
  February 10, 2023 by Vrixic##bug, ##bugfix, ##gamedev

  After being done with implementing the core mechanics in our game the Mantle, Grappling, and Hacking systems. Many bugs were found while play-testing the mechanics. BUG 1: Mantling Backwards Problem:... Continue reading

  
• Toggling Scannable Objects
  February 10, 2023 by TheSenate2002#Scanner, #Levels

  Problem: Early on in the development of Shutdown, I implemented a scanner that the player could use to see key objects and enemies. This scanner worked exactly as we wanted but needed tweaking through... Continue reading

  
• Craig the Cutter Chop Attack Issue - Myles
  February 04, 2023 by mditcharo

  PROBLEM: While making Craig's first phase chop attack, I ran into an issue where the attack would always kill the player even if he misses. The attack would start by creating a rectangle indicating wh... Continue reading
• Mantle Teleport Glitch/Bug
  February 04, 2023 by Vrixic#bug, #unrealengine4, #cpp, #programming, #game

  This bug was found during the last cross-studio testing we had. It was a weird bug that 'teleported' the player to a location when the player spammed the mantle key. Problem: The problem is that it wa... Continue reading
• Decorator Always Returning False
  February 03, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Problem: I was working on the baby robot ncp this week which required me to create my own custom decorator. This was my first time using custom decorators with behavior tre... Continue reading
• Interact Interface Not Calling Interact Function
  February 03, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author - Cameron Euston The Problem: This week I ran into an issue when working on the interact system. The issue was when I would try to interact with a key collectable, it would print the debug mess... Continue reading
• Making Wires Scannable
  February 03, 2023 by TheSenate2002#Scanner, #Puzzle, #Wire

  Problem: While designing our levels and puzzles, we decided that we wanted to have a way to show the player what hackable objects are connected to what interfaces. To do this we decided to use wires t... Continue reading

  
• Visibility on Fuse Puzzle not Toggling Correctly
  February 03, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #Devleoper

  Author - Ethan Ortega Problem: Upon creating a puzzle involving four fuses and interacting with different levers to toggle the fuses on and off, I encountered a problem with the fuse's visibility. I w... Continue reading
• Level 1 Complete redesign and lightning issues
  February 03, 2023 by Boomishhe

  author: Aleksei Ratnikov Issue: Our team came to a decision to re-make level 1. We drew out a design on the board, and everything looked good, so I began blocking it out. That's when I faced a couple... Continue reading

  
• Fixing the Saving and Loading
  January 27, 2023 by mditcharo

  When working with the saving and loading for our game, I ran into an issue where a save file would be created when entering the main menu. This issue would cause conflict with the load game functional... Continue reading
• Grappling Hook
  January 26, 2023 by Vrixic

  Problem: How do I make a grappling hook? Being the first time ever working on implementing a grappling hook can be a nightmare as physics can be the end of a game. I first started to research pendulum... Continue reading

  
• Changing Z4CH's Player Model
  January 26, 2023 by ekicks0#Games, #DeveloperIssues

  Problem: When the development of Shutdown began, we knew we needed to find the perfect model to represent our main character Z4CH. After a few hours of searching, we kept coming back to one model. The... Continue reading
• Level 2 Blockout
  January 24, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Problem: As a game designer for this specific game, the issues that were encountered for level 2 block out were that scale-wise, the game was supposed to fit the theme of level 1 and keep the same fee... Continue reading

  
• Collectable System not Updated the UI Correctly
  January 24, 2023 by ekicks0#Development, #Games

  Author: Ethan Ortega Problem : The UI that would pop up on the top right corner of the screen to alert the player what the number of collectibles they have gathered. Each time you would pick up a coll... Continue reading
• Patrol Path Issue
  January 21, 2023 by CameronEuston

  Author: Cameron Euston The Problem: For this first week, I worked on the ai patrol behaviors. For the most part this went over smoothly. However there was a feature of this behavior that would allow d... Continue reading
• Fan Obstacle not Moving Player
  January 20, 2023 by mditcharo

  Author: Myles Ditcharo One of my tasks I had to do for Shutdown was make a fan obstacle that pushes the player and object away from it. While making this I ran into an issue where the fan would only p... Continue reading
• Creating a Scanner
  January 20, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  For our game, I was tasked with creating a scanner feature for our main character Z4CH. For this, I wanted to have the effect be able to highlight objects through walls and be able to have the highlig... Continue reading
• Level Design
  January 20, 2023 by Boomishhe

  Author: Aleksei Ratnikov Issue: While working on level 1 of blocking it out, I've faced a couple of issues with how players get an idea of where to go. Somewhat difficult was ensuring the level's scal... Continue reading
• Infinite Mantling Bug
  January 20, 2023 by Vrixic#MantlingSystem

  Author: Vrij Patel Issue: In the game, you were able to spam Space to start mantling infinitely and after mantling sometimes you would fall, instead of being on top of the block. While the infinite ma... Continue reading
• Problem with Radial Menu
  January 20, 2023 by ekicks0#DeveloperIssues

  Author: Ethan Ortega The development team was experiencing compiler errors with the main player blueprint. When the radial menu was integrated with the main character there were points where it would... Continue reading
• Introduction to Shutdown
  January 18, 2023 by TheSenate2002

  Throughout Shutdown, you play as Z4ch, the lone working robot in a run-down warehouse. Be stealthy and uncover mysteries as you solve puzzles, tackle enemies and figure out what has happened to this w... Continue reading