Spite: To Hel And Back

Description

As a viking with a death wish, sober up as you fight your way through an undead infested mountain to prove you’re too strong for death.

With this game being the first one to be developed using Unreal as an editor and a fully custom engine, I wanted to work with streamlining the pipeline side of things. We were provided with a basic export script for Unreal actors which I used as a base.

I quickly modified the script to exclude unnecessary exported fields and extending it with some custom objects. The script came with some UI elements for a menu and export button. I used this to create my own buttons for exporting a level and automatically opening it in the game in either debug or release mode.

I was met with a challenge when I wanted to export a list of animations used for a character. With little to no information on how to extract nodes from an animation blueprint, I was trying probably over a hundred ways before I finally found the one that worked.

It was for this project that I really got into creating scripts for automation. As we needed .DDS files for our textures, but as Unreal couldn’t seem to handle that, I created a script to convert files from .PNG to .DDS with the appropriate compression technique based on the name of the file (e.g. BC7 for *_C.png). Apparently, other groups had heard of my script and wanted to use it themselves, so I cleaned it up a bit and sent it over to them.

I also created a script which automatically created a release build with only the necessary files included and automatically modified asset paths. The script also increased a number in a file that was used know which version was used if someone encountered a crash while testing levels.

Project Details