DEVLOG #3

DEVLOG#3: 5/25/2026-5/30/2026

-First day on week 3, and I’m very excited. A few people have mentioned being excited about this project over the weekend and it’s like a new wave of motivation.

-I’m going to try creating milestones for each week to have a clearer picture of what I’m trying to succeed in.

-This weeks milestone: I want to implement my first character using the character base and create a version of Shrike

-I’m really uncertain of how hard this will be. Ideally everything is there, I just need to make a child/instance of the base and then override most of the functions so that it can do what Shrike did. Again, the hardest part that I’m most nervous about is that I just really don’t know what this entails, or what this means in practice. So we’ll see I guess. The most exciting part, however, is that if it’s very doable and easy then I’ll probably want to make a few characters. 

If this goes well, and I finish more than I expect, then I’ll start working on some of the art side of things in a very blocky sort of way. I hate environment art, so again, we’ll see.

-After doing more research, I want to establish base stats first before continuing on to making one character. Annoying. Super annoying. But I think it’ll be worth it; I really want this to be clean as possible. Hopefully this will all be done by tonight and then tomorrow I’ll FINALLY be able to start making a character.

-All the stats are plugged in, and should work. It’s still kind of foggy to me how everything plugs in and will look like with combat, but essentially the bones are there. Tomorrow I’m going to make a test dummy that can take damage to make sure my whole system works, and then after that I can FINALLY start making an actual character. Hopefully. Still super hopeful that the next update there will be a type of Shrike jumping around and shooting stuff.

5/26/2026

-Today I want to create a dummy target, or essentially an enemy that I can damage to make sure everything works; attack damage, ability power, resistances, etc. Probably an ally target as well, but that might require some kind of “this is an enemy and this is an ally” logic, and seeing as it’s purpose would be just to see if I can heal someone for the support role, maybe I’ll just hold off for now on differentiating between the two but we’ll see. Just gotta make at least a dummy target. 

-created the Target Dummy, easy enough, but trouble started when I tried to apply damage. Focusing just on primary fire (having shrike in mind), I was thinking everything was a projectile till I googled it just in case: it said it was a hitscan????? So I tried the wiki page as well as watched Shrike gameplay break downs and how to play shrike tutorials, and I couldn’t find one that confirmed if it was either: meltdown mode initiate. I went to reddit and asked, and unanimously everyone agreed that it’s a projectile, and that no one can actually remember a hitscan move. Hell yeah. So time to jump back and make projectiles, and holy cow they’re a pain in the arse. Not really, but they’re a pain learning how they fit in my workflow. The biggest issue is that the main HUD is in my BP_Character_Base, so that means ALLLLL the characters share. Which means as I damage the enemy, all of a sudden my HUD becomes theirs. Pardon, not “my HUD”, OUR HUD. Whoops. So I have to fix that. Also, with how I have it right now, the projectile base is setting the damage, which is not correct. So this is gonna be an annoying night.

-FINALLY caught back up. The resolve was just removing all the updated HUD health from the character base and then binding it to the progress bars in the HUD. 

-Big thing I learned while searching more stuff up for projectiles, only change if their behavior changes. If it’s a visual difference, then you can just expose parameters. 

-So in the end today I was able to:

• Create a Target Dummy.
• Create a function to do damage using projectiles while being able to edit the damage and other data points inside the character.
• Separate the HUD from the character base.
• Make it so that the character base child blueprints can pick their own icons.

I did create a function for healing abilities for later on, but I didn’t create a way to test it out. I’m not too worried about it not working, but I didn’t really want to push it since the idea of being able to heal is more character specific; so it’s sort of a “we’ll cross that bridge once we get there” kind of thing. 

At this point, I am very confident in finally moving on to creating Shrike and I am so so so so so so excited. If this goes well, then I’ll start creating a whole ton more. One thing I did notice was that there was a bug when playing the game; if you land on the ground while having your glider out, your glider stamina bar stays visible. I think it’s just because there’s no logic checker to make sure it’s gone if the glider is gone. It’s not a big deal, it just looks sloppy so I’ll eventually fix that. But that’s all for today.

5/27/2026

-I forgot to start typing stuff this morning, but essentially the whole day I’ve been working on Shrike’s primary fire. I learned about override functions and class defaults in child blueprints, they are soooo cool. 

It was easy to make shrikes bullets work on release and have a reload event, but her passive was a PAINNNNN IN THE BUTT. Basically, it’s tied to projectile, to base character, to widget, to shrike, and a bunch of crossed paths. It was very tiresome, but it works. 

I also never realized how broken it kind of is. Or maybe I over-tuned it, I followed the ability description on the wiki, but I don’t know. Whatever, I’m tired, and I’m going to work on her next ability tomorrow. 

5/28/2026

-Today I want to try and make another one of Shrikes abilities, maybe her alt fire because it’s a different type of projectile, I think? I was planning to go from Q -> E -> R -> Shift -> Alt fire sort of order, but Q gives vision and removes fog of war. I don’t have any fog of war… So I need to create a fog of war before I make Q, I think. 

One thing I’m realizing is that no one had an E ability.

-Finished creating a prototype of a fog of war, it’s not pretty, but for the sake of creating a “Q” scouting ability for shrike, I think it works. Now I need to make the actual Q. If I do that before I call it quits for today, it’ll be a HUGE win.

-Right now, I can press Q, camera zooms out, aim where I want to launch Q, and then launch it. Or I can press Q, zoom out, aim, and then press primary fire to cancel it. However, I cannot reactivate it to stop it mid flight, nor does it give vision at all. 

I’m really glad I got vision working, and I’m glad I got some sort of base for the Q to work, but it sucks that I feel like I’m so far away from accomplishing it. I just need to sleep on it.

5/29/2026

-Today I am DETERMINED to finish the Q ability, the R ability, and Shift ability for Shrike. I think the R and shift ability won’t be hard, R is pretty straight forward and shift I don’t imagine to be that hard. I don’t know about RMB though. It might not be hard, but I’m nervous about some of its systems and how they work. It might end up being easy, but idk, expect the worst and hope for the best.

-ITTTT WOOOOORRRRRKKKKKKKKKSSSSSS, it took FOREVER, but I was able to create a Test projectile that will reveal people in the fog of war when it overlaps them. It really wasn’t that hard, but what tripped me up the most was that I was testing it with a static actor that carried the reveal logic and placed it on top of one of the test dummies. Because of this, on event begin play the logic is I get not counting for an overlap event because they spawn together at the same location? I’m not too sure why it didn’t count it, maybe if it moved out and then back in it would count it, but it worked. Now the only issue is that if you’re already “visible” and the actor overlaps you, it will then set you invisible….. -IT FINALLY WORKS!!! And the solution was actually that in the BP_Test, I just needed to call UpdateVisibilty as Shrike. I was using the character base, but the problem was that the enemy was also character base, so what it considered true BP_Shrike would call false, but since I never casted to shrike [the actual player in this case], it never used her "IsRevealed" to set visibility, only the enemies. And that made it backwards and act really weird with the vision. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but basically on overlap events, the compiler was fighting with two truths, and I didn’t set the one that I actually wanted.

 -NEVEEERRR MINDDDDDDD. This ONEEEEE Ability is literally the bane of my existence. Visibility is just constantly a fight I guess. -I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT, BUT IT WORKS. Blood, sweat, and tears, this literally was the hardest thing I’ve had to do thus far. Essentially the fix was having to create a function inside the base that would refresh the visibility. It was a STRUGGLE, but Shrike’s Q is FINALLY in. I’m going to cry myself to sleep now. [stewie crying noises]

5/30/2026

-Late start, but whatever. I really only want to try to do Ult and Dash for shrike before I upload SuperRevive_1_2 to itchio. If I have time then I will do the RMB, but I just have a feeling it’s gonna eat up a lot of time, and I don’t know if I want to do that tonight. Not that it’s not doable, but I don’t want to have it feel like a chore and rush it; in the end, I want to be in at least a stable enough mood to want to take the time to learn why I’m doing what I’m doing and not just blindly follow a tutorial. But again, we’ll see.

-I finished R, it was pretty easy as expected. I didn’t do anything too different though, and it’s basically a fancy primary fire.

Next I’m going to do the dash, but there are some differences.

My version I want: 

• Still want player to launch in the opposite direction they're facing. 
• Still slows, but now also marks enemies hit and deals 45 + (25%) damage. 
• I don't think it needs grounding, especially if it applies mark now.
• I'll keep the resets on "knock", but now I want shrike to get a reset if she kills the player within three seconds of landing it so that it ties with the mark better and has more interesting combos. 

I’m sort of in an odd place because personally there are changes I’d want to do to existing character kits, like also for her Q I don’t want anti-heal, instead I want it to add a mark if spotted, but I’m also like, “but will everyone else like that change?” This could MAYBE over-tune her, but I also always thought it was weird that her Q applied anti-heal (that was removed and replaced with the mark apply, I never mentioned that), and that none of her abilities other than her R really used her passive. PERSONALLY, I think utilizing her passive more with the marks with her other abilities would actually make a fun gameplay, idk. I don’t know how people will necessarily react to it, but I think it’s fun. If this ever becomes something bigger than a greybox UE5 MOBA project, THAN we can revisit balance. Already, I think I’d balance her passives damage before making the mark less recurring, even just reading it is actually nuts: “Hitting Marked enemies with Truetalon Rifle (LMB) or Full Bore (R) detonates the Mark, dealing 175 + (145%) damage.” like, girl what?... No wonder she was a noob stomper. I played her, and I had fun with her, but I didn’t really realize what I was doing lol.

Anyways, on to her dash. 

-I finished the dash, it wasn’t too hard, NOTHING compared to the Q, but it got a bit confusing when making sure the variables connected to the right place. The biggest thing I learned about this was to make sure to have place holders to hold data that you can jump back, something like pointers maybe?? I know there’s a C++ concept like that, but I forget the name of them. 

I was basically fighting why once the enemy was slowed they wouldn’t go back to normal speed. And it was because I was using their max speed to slow them down and to remove their slow. But they didn’t have anything to reset to; clearing the slow by using their max speed that was affected by the slow doesn’t reset it to it’s previous speed, it just keeps it at the slow speed. So I use a “normalspeed” variable that I actually used for the “sneak” mechanic to hold the max speed original value, and to reset back to when I need to clear the slow. Also made sure that I was using NormalSpeed to set the characters speed in the beginning of Event Play as well. See? Not that bad.

-I’m gonna call it a night, and this will be it for week 3, Devlog#3. Ultimately, I didn’t finish Shrike: I didn’t do her RMB. But I made a few things I didn’t plan on, like the “Fog of War”, and enemy to actually hurt, and learning how the hell vision works because holy cow; the worst part is, I don’t know if vision works in a PvP setting…. But I’m starting to understand that workflow of programming a character, variables that need to be considered, and how much logic really goes into things like this. I finished her LMB, Q, R, and Shift dash, and then Enemy test and Fog of War, so I’ll take it as a win.

Next week, I want to finish the Shrike prototype and go to either menus or art next. We’ll see. But I’m looking forward to just not doing anything tomorrow.