Another post for the ages! My name, again, is Cole Tourney.

For this "The Case of Elias Granger", I was delegated to Lighting and Post Processing. With that in mind, I ended up doing a bit more programming and art than my previous projects as a level designer.

My time as a Lighting Programmer and an (in a PPV sense) Artist:
For the game, we wanted to be able to elicit certain emotions in the player(s). To do this, I took on the task of making an instance-editable lighting system. This came with various variables (like what I did there?) to control color, and flickering.  The goal was to make it easy for the rest of the programming / art teams to use and interact with without having to access any of the blueprints themselves. Each "emotion" was turned into a callable function that was meant to be connected to various pieces of dialogue in the game.

We ended up using a site called Miro for our kanban board, and as such I didn’t track my time as closely as I’d expected to.

Uh oh’s and Oopsies:
After doing this in a separate project with the intent of migration, I was alerted to a very important concept in Unreal Engine: Backwards compatibility, or lack thereof. Because of this, I was going to need to remake the entire system from scratch either already within the project itself, OR in any Unreal project of the same version. Thankfully, I was able to simply copy over the code and all that was needed was to remake each variable. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

I think that time was the biggest enemy here (that and other final projects in the same span). If we’d have had even just a few more weeks to dedicate to the project, I firmly believe that the workload would have felt a lot lighter on the team as a whole.

Learnin’
One of the biggest things that I learned just so happens to be a part of the thing that I’m proudest of, so yay me for saving typing time. Before this project, as I’ve said, I could barely call myself a programmer. And while that still very well might be true, this has been a massive step in the right direction. This project gave me a reason to learn more about enums. While that might seem like an insignificant and easy thing, it was a game changer for me involving the lighting system.