Dev Log 11 - What's to Come...

Well, it’s nearing the end of November, and the content rollout continues. The Physics Assets for Ragdoll mini series is almost wrapped up. This week’s video covered in-depth configuration of the constraints on Physics Bodies… basically making sure that all of the joints bend correctly when ragdolling. The final video will cover self-collisions in the Physics Asset. Enhanced Input Gems got a new video on the Hold and Release Input Trigger. You might have guessed that this mini series might cover all of the Trigger types, and you’d be right! And while it’s Free Tier, there are a few Gold Tier exclusives scheduled as well, involving creating some custom Input Trigger classes for more custom behavior. Those will be coming out in December.

But Enhanced Input is really just a kind of nice-to-have. It’s one of those topics you really do need to understand, but it’s not the juicy stuff. What about the highly-requested topics? Topics requested for serious courses. I’m working on some of that right now, and I’ll be releasing a little teaser video soon.

The C++ From Beginner to Unreal course now has some quizzes, which can be found on the course page in the Druid Mechanics Patreon Vault. Some of these contain code snippets for you to paste into your IDE and compile, run, and debug. Thankfully, Obsidian markdown supports C++ code blocks, so they are easy to copy. I’ll be continuing to put effort into the quizzes for the Unreal Engine Master Class collection (the first course of which is C++ From Beginner to Unreal) so that they become an essential component to your learning.

Some of you have been following my dev logs since their inception, and you may recall me talking about plans for future topics. The Ultimate course remaster, etc. Now may be a good time to talk about that a little bit.

The Ultimate C++ course does need a bit of a remaster. Back in Dev Log 2, I mentioned a new Ultimate course, as well as some content on inventory, crafting, and questing systems. All that stuff is still underway! I’ve had a couple of deviations from that plan this year, with the Multiplayer and GAS Crash Courses, partly in response to student requests. Partly the difficulty in merging so many topics together is the balance between making a course standalone and making it have the depth capable of incorporating content from other courses. For instance, a course on crafting requires an inventory. To make a standalone course on crafting, ideally, the course would cover inventory creation (unless an inventory system is provided for you as a starter pack). What I like about crash courses is that they can cover a topic completely while remaining a standalone course. The course project itself is less deep, but the focus of the course is the subject matter, and that allows the student to complete the course more quickly without being hung up on game-specific roadblocks. Both crash courses and project-based courses each have their own strengths, I believe, and ideally I think a learning path should contain both. At any rate, I mentioned some topics that all coalesce together, which is great for those who are planning on a large game project that contains all those topics, but my students are making all sorts of games and have all sorts of different needs, and I want to be careful not to veer too far into catering only to one particular group of game devs.

A simple solution is to teach concepts in isolated courses, but to follow modular coding principles so they are easily integrated into each other if need be. This is the route I’ll be striving for mostly, while trying not to overengineer too much. We don’t need more Lyras.

But back to my original point. I’ve mentioned the creation of several types of game systems. Some of these could be implemented in any number of ways. I want to make sure that the methods used are best practice, as well as modern. For many of these systems, this means employing some of the newer features of Unreal Engine.

Perhaps not coincidentally, these features happen to be the most requested topics in the #tutorial-requests channel in the Druid Mechanics Discord.

So then, wouldn’t it be the best outcome for everyone if these new engine features were covered and used to implement some of these game systems? I think so. In fact, I’ve already begun on one of Unreal’s more modern systems, and it will be the next tutorial series (alongside the C++ From Beginner to Unreal course).

I also have a line-up of some of Unreal’s newer features planned, and am structuring new content to use these as well.

Game-specific features, systems and mechanics are great. From a teaching perspective, they are examples used to impart knowledge of the developer’s systems and utilities on a student. But game-specific features are the fish. The tools, the systems, the concepts, and the theory are the fishing pole. We’ll be continuing to expand our tackle boxes in the months ahead.

As always, happy dev’ing, my friends,

Stephen