Devlog 1: Sandy Boyett: Player Controls and Mechanics

The Problem: 

This week, I was tasked with implementing Enhanced Input controls to enable player movement within our world map. Since I hadn’t fully learned this system in previous months, it required significant research to understand and apply it correctly. Despite this, I still encountered challenges in achieving the complete functionality that we aimed for, particularly with player jumping. I successfully got movement and jumping working in the blueprint side of things but faced difficulties when converting these features into code. The jumping mechanic, in particular still seems to be an issue that has yet to be fixed, even with multiple efforts that I've tried thus far. 

In addition to the input controls, I managed to correctly position the staff on the player. Initially, we thought the necessary socket didn’t exist, so a new one was created, but we later discovered it was built into the player skeleton and simply needed to be set correctly. I created a new blueprint specifically for the staff, set it as a child component to the player and ensured it was correctly set to the player’s weapon socket. I also ensured that the game mode base was created and configured properly inside of it, including setting up the right controller—which I also created—and the player pawn. This setup was necessary to ensure that when the game starts, it initializes with the correct items and allows for proper player control based on the input configuration. 

The Solution: 

For the Enhanced Input Controls that I was working with, I reached out to Andrew. He had previous experience with it from a previous project and was more than willing to assist in getting things set up to be used. He assisted in setting up the input mappings correctly, including assigning the appropriate buttons/keys and configuring the context mapping system that was being used. With these, I quickly realized that Enhanced Input was a bit more detailed than the old and deprecated system that I previously used in prior projects. 

Additionally, when it came to positioning the staff on the player, I did rely on my team for a bit of help.  We met to review the project, but they were able to help me discover the socket that had been overlooked.  The weapon socket on the player already existed and with this new knowledge, we were able to delete the one that was created and instead, set things right. However, even with this assistance from my team, the jumping mechanic remains unresolved and is so far proving to be a bit more intricate than I initially thought. I'm still working to try to resolve this and get it fixed.