Hello everybody, it's the Paper Park team here, and the past two weeks have seen us learn a lot about Unreal, though not actually from our project!

Paper Park team members Carlos and Zé participated in Gamedev Técnico's Coffee and Jam, powered by Delta Q. Guilherme was also a participant but in a different group. So our members were busy this week. Carlos and Zé actually developed a game in Unreal 5, as an experiment in C++. 

It's called Alive. 

It's bad.

But it was a great learning experience! Though half our dev time was spent dealing with Perforce and Unreal Engine C++ problems, that taught us a lot. And we did manage to get a first-person shooter controller done in C++ and learned a lot about how it works and how to organize code in Unreal. We're yet unsure if we are gonna convert any of our code to C++, but it was not a wasted effort. 

We also had some Perforce troubles, and we do really need to start understanding it better. Hopefully, we can get in touch with someone who has experience setting up these servers. What we recently learned is that a server can only have 5 users on it, and given one is used exclusively for the coordinators to manage it in our case, we have four slots. So we're gonna talk to coordination about either purchasing more slots or converting our more personal accounts into more generic ones that may be used by anyone.

Guilherme also did some research outside the jam about level streaming. Turns out Unreal has built-in Level Streming volumes to allow devs to load in parts of the game as the player goes. This means that rather than having segmented locations in levels, like older platformers, we can have something big and seamless. We might need to hide some stuff with a loading hallway, or other clever tricks, but it seems possible, and the system is a very intuitive way to accomplish something a bit complicated.

We also finally locked down Pedro Moço as a level designer. Though for now, as he is busy with school projects, we will only be having very casual conversations and brainstorming sessions, trying to figure out what the level is. This is important because we want to start assembling a document outlining all the goals in the level, and there's been a hanging cloud over beginning work on that document, as we're unsure of what will actually end up in the game, or get cut right now. Still, a really welcome role on the team.

So what are we planning to do these next two weeks:

• Finish modeling the dragon
• Start describing/storyboarding tickets
• Write a Fairy Glade level description and introductory cutscene
• Program the frog transformation movement
• Finish the Swimming Idle animation
• Discuss the Fairy Glade level design
• Continue work on the game camera

We'll see you two weeks from now to let you know how it went. This is the Paper Park Team, signing off!