Responsibilities:

During the project, Parasite Zero, my responsibilities were to implement the game mechanics of the designers. For me this meant I would focus on the players mutation mechanics. In the beginning of the project, I created the Player Manager Blueprint, and a base for the shotgun and bone blade. In the later half of the project I was tasked with creating a wall climbing mechanic for the player. This mechanic took a lot longer than i thought it would due to character complications.

Mutations:

The first half of the project I was tasked with working on mutations the player would be able to utilize throughout the game. When we talked about the game, I was told the mutations would work like actual mutations where the player would mutate parts of themselves into the weapons they were using (shotgun or bone blade). With that being said I decided to work on the bone shotgun first. The base shotgun I was able to put together. I made the shotgun shoot rays from the players hand and planned on attaching effects to the shotgun. Next I moved to the Bone Blade. I had not worked with animations before this project so I spent some time learning how animations work. When looking into animations I found out about animation notifies which I attempted to implement into the players bone blade animation. When trying to test out both these mutations I found it hard to try and test while figuring out how they would work alongside the mutation meter. In order to help test how these mutations would work in the game I decided to add the Player Manager and added a simple system that controlled the players mutation meter which would unlock the players mutation. 

Wall Climbing:

The second half of project I was tasked with creating a wall climb for the player that would make traversing the make easier. When first diving into wall climbing I began by trying to figure out how to make the player move up and down. I was wondering why certain bits of code was not working how I believed it should on the character so I decided to ask our coding lead for advice. After we both looked into the code, we discovered that the movement code from the Parent character was messing with the movement code I was trying to implement. Our coding lead told me that if I messed with the Parent character that it could lead to problems with the main character through either what others were working on or through the GASP system. He recommended that I create a separate character and then swapping to a new character when wall climbing. I thought this would make things easier since I would not have to worry about merge conflicts, unfortunately this did lead to some problems later on. I spent some time and created a wall climbing system that was functional but contained many bugs. After the initial wall climb was created I worked on a system that swapped player characters depending on if the player was climbing or not. After both initial mechanics were created I decided that I should go back and fix some of the bugs that were found in both. The first complication with the use of different player characters is managing the transforms of both characters when swapping as well as collisions for both. Next I had spent more time on bug fixes before I moved on to creating a mantle system so the player could actually get to the top of climbable surfaces. Here I learned more about animations and how to use motion warping which is a fun thing to mess around with. The addition of mantling combined with character swapping caused the biggest frustration with using two characters. The cause of this was because the camera would snap to a different rotation on the other character, unfortunately it was not as simple as just grabbing the transform of the previous characters camera. I eventually got the camera to be smoother than it was, but i had spent too much time trying to smooth it out. After fixing the camera transition, I found out that the Parent Character contained an On Possess camera change function. This discovery lead to some frustration, but in the end lead to the solution to creating a smoother camera. 

One mistake I made during this project was not asking more about what was wanted from me as a coder. If i had simply asked more about the shotgun and bone blade I would have been able to contribute more on that end as well as save time due to a clearer sense of direction. Like always I do think I struggled with time management, I do think i could have spent more time polishing the things I worked on as well as help out with other mechanics. Despite these mistakes, I am proud of the work I have completed during this project as well as the skills I have learned throughout it. A huge thanks to everyone who worked on this project and to the leads, can't wait to see the projects they'll be apart of.