Bio: Todd D. Vance, grew up in Moorefield, WV, math major in college but took a handful of programming classes, in C, Pascal, BASIC (remember that?), and Fortran, received doctorate in mathematics at University of Virginia. Immediately went to work in DC for the feds doing lots of things, but mostly computer programming. There I learned by reading and doing, Perl, Python, Java, and a middling amount of C++, just enough to modify existing code and learn it is a hodgepodge language trying to be too many things at once. Then one day, even though people say “don’t quit your day job!” (I’m an amateur musician as well; that’s what they always tell musicians), I quit my day job and returned to Moorefield, WV. The pay was great, but it’s less fun to do work for someone else’s glory.
Game Career: In high school, I used to make lousy BASIC games for the Commodore VIC20. During my paid career, at nights after work I’d do things like make Duke Nukem levels and hack their CON scripts so Duke could go bowling, etc. I played with Unreal Engine 4 when it came out, starting a couple months before it was made free (so, yeah, I paid a little). I would watch tutorial videos on a laptop at night in my hotel room after away conferences and when I returned home, try and not succeed much in doing stuff in Unreal and then decided to take the Unreal course. Unreal was still hard, even with the course—I could follow along, but I forgot how to do things very quickly. So, I also took the Unity course (an easier platform for beginners), and came back to Unreal, finally finished the course and started a First Person Shooter project (still in progress).
Goals for This Course: As long as the course is here, I figured, why not add multiplayer capability to the FPS. So, I watched the first lecture of the section and just tried it out as-is with 2 players. As somewhat expected, it bombed: I could posses one player and do fine, but with the other, he wouldn’t move and the log filled with one error message every frame. That’s of course because I’d been building it with single player in mind. That also begins to answer the question “what difficulties do you foresee?”. The game has to be reworked to handle multiplayer.
To answer the question of game type, of course this is the Unreal-focus real time session game.
The main challenge is using a system I made not yet multiplayer-ready. The most obvious thing is all those Blueprint “Get Player” nodes left at the default “Player 0”. It also uses hash table variables that Unreal doesn’t let you check the “Replicate” box on, so that has to be dealt with somehow. Also, I certainly didn’t think about making it robust against cheating. Lots of single-bit variables a hacker could simply flip to get extra abilities.