For the first week of working on Pestilence I decided to focus on cleaning up the primary gameplay loops of the project, starting with the player's movement and abilities. Some components of the movement system are borrowed from a previous project I worked on with my capstone group while at George Mason, adjusted to better fit my goals for the gameplay style of this project vs that of Atonement.
Since I am going to be using Unreal Engine 4 and the dynamic crouch system and dual handed animation system from Atonement run in Unreal Engine 5 I needed to rewrite the basics of the system to run properly in UE4.
Not much has changed between the two engines animation graph wise so it wasn't too difficult to recreate thankfully, though UE4 seems to have issues with playing montages properly which will definitely be a bug that I fight to fix later on in development.
The same rings true for the backend of the movement and abilities, though since I plan on having different abilities and functionality there wasn't as much to borrow from system wise aside from BPIs for the players stats and communicating those to the in game HUD. The player's animations in Atonement were animated within UE5, something that I'd also like to change for this project. So I made a stand alone rig in Blender to animate from and pipe those animations into engine from there.
From here the similarities to Atonement pretty much end so development from here on will be entirely fumbling around in the dark and trying to get things to work as an artist struggling with programming.
