HCI for Games - Changelog v1.3: Pause menu functionality and HUD advancements.

Changelog v1.3;

In a late addition to my HCI setup, with the deadline approaching fast, I have added a functional pause menu to my setup in accordance with my brief, utilising the same visuals from the main menu and options menu creation.

For engine based navigation purposes, I applied the pause menu functionality to the left alt key. As the escape key is commonly used to pause videogames on PC, but escape also closes the previewer in Unreal, so as opposed to clicking the close button each time I tested the feature, I instead simply placed the pause functionality on another key.

From the basic pause menu, I duplicated the options widgets created for my original menu and applied the necessary changes to the event graph to account for the different widgets, and different menus I would need to be accessing from the pause menu.

As a result I gained a fully transitioning pause menu, with the same level of current functionality as I have in the main menu setup.

As a final menu touch, whilst not required in accordance with my brief, I added quit and reset functionality to the menu, allowing me to pause and quit the title, exiting to the main menu, which then would allow me to quit to a theoretical operating system upon packaging of a project like this.

I had left this functionality til late on in the development process as I had deemed it would be a much tougher job than it actually was, and it has provided me with some more blueprinting knowledge, allowing me to grasp how simple some things I assume to be complex actually are.

This will help me both physically develop blueprints going forward, and possibly also mentally, instead of assuming something will be tough, potentially driving me to tackle more blueprints head on.

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As another point of reference within my brief, advanced HUD visuals were also listed, however I feel with my project as it currently stands both physically and thematically, elaborated HUD elements are not required, as I prefer to keep the setup much more simplistic. I may change these at another point in time, and in the future working on other project will almost certainly have to create custom heads up displays, but for now, I feel my HUD is fine, thus I can justify it remaining simple in its current form.
As is my personal preference, I feel the only changes I would actually make to the current HUD, comprised of the Health, Energy and Rage meters would be to make each bar simpler. I could tackle this by either leaving the labels and taking away the colours, making the bars monotone, or taking away the labels on each bar completely. I feel this way due to the amount of high end titles in the games industry these days that remove the labels, as end users are familiar enough with the setups and understand the differences in colour fairly quickly. Games such as The Witcher, Bloodborne and Dark Souls all make use of a coloured bar system, with no labels.

Going forward from here I may well elaborate on the bars for health, energy and rage at a later date, as and when I feel necessary through the development process of the game, as the visuals may possibly demand an upgrade as the rest of my visuals improve in quality and as I find a solid theme for my UI overall. I feel there is no real necessity for a visual upgrade right now, taking into account my theme and current visuals.

HCI for Games - Changelog v1.2: Character Customisation.

Changelog v1.2;

To expand on further developmental procedures which could be implemented into a HCI system in games, I have begun but not yet finished the implementation of a character customisation feature for my system.

I began by creating a simple mesh which I could add onto my character as an extra visual entity, and chose to make some wolverine styled claws. Whilst these are not appropriate for my character they were the first thing to come to mind in the short time given to think of potential items for customisation.

Upon creation of these claws, I was asked to make them somewhat 'quirky', and with that I decided to change the design of the claws to that of a cutlery set, leaving one claw in its normal, blade-like form, and changing the end of the other two claws, one into a fork, and the other into a spoon. These were all relatively low poly meshes created quickly for the purposes of importing them into the engine for functionality implementation.

I imported my claws into Unreal and socketed them to my character as appropriate, the outline of which can be seen in the screenshot below.

I began to apply this through my blueprinting code, but due to the system I have set up, was not 100% sure about how to implement this into my system. Whilst I was prepared to modify some widgets and allow for the system to be brought in at the character select transition in my menus, I was not sure about the activating and deactivating of the mesh itself, as such the mesh currently sita active on my character as he runs around the level.

I am currently at a crossroads with the implementation of this feature, as I feel it is not appropriate for my level and does not fit my character design, as such I also feel I would not plan on keeping this feature in game further down the line.

To further justify not using this within my game however, I will be leaving this within my level at the current time as a feature I intend on working on and improving for my own personal growth, and improvement in the blueprinting process.