Cardboard Barbarian: Right Tool for the Job

Controls: 

Movement- WASD

Look- Mouse

Interact- E

Pause/Quest Menu- P

Synopsis:

This was a project for first game jam of the DMG Discord Server. The theme: One Tool, Many Uses. Rox the Cardboard Barbarian wants to buy a new hammer from the local blacksmith, but doesn't have money. Do odd jobs around town to get money. Once you get 100 gold, return to the blacksmith for your new hammer. 

Retrospective: 

This was my first project completed in Unreal Engine. Naturally, there were many things that I have learned from this project, and several things that I could have done better. One of the biggest mistakes was the way I used tutorials. When building a system, such as the dialogue system and quest system, I followed the tutorial for one system and then just tried making it work well with another system. I originally just followed the tutorial to the letter, rather than take the time to understand how and why I was doing each step. Looking back a better method would have been to follow each tutorial separately in a different project, learned how they worked, and then designed a simpler version for the game. For example, for the quest system. Each quest has a list of stages, and each stage had a list of objectives. In reality, for something like this, I could have stuck with only a quest level and only used what I needed, rather than adding the extra "fluff" that the tutorial had. The code would have been cleaner and easier to use. Another thing that I could have done better was use of assets. I ended up just throwing a bunch of asset packs that I thought could be cool into the game, and this lead to a lot of headache in cleaning up the project for the build in the end. What I could have done instead is have a separate dump project to put the assets, and then migrate the ones that I wanted over. The last main thing that I want to cover is making sure to do a test build towards the beginning of the project. I didn't build the project until after I thought I was done, and ended up running into a lot of issues that took a while to fix. Issues that, if we hadn't of extended the project, would have prevented me from finishing.