In this update Joni, our Lead Programmer, introduces himself and talks about how we are creating the game inside Unreal Engine 4 with a mix of Blueprints and C++.

Posted by machinaea on Dec 8th, 2014

Introducing Joni, Lead Programmer

Hi – I’m Joni and I’m excited to be a part of this project. I’d first like to tell you a bit about myself. I’ve always loved gaming and my favorite game is probably Final Fantasy IX - I still have a working Playstation installed in my living room with unscathed FF IX discs ready to be played. I’m also a big fan of Blizzard and I play a lot of Hearthstone on my free time. I prefer constructed mode over arena and recently I’ve played mostly with warrior or warlock decks. I’m somewhat familiar with card games and I hope we can bring you the best gaming experience we possibly can with Ancestory and I’m ready to work hard towards that goal.

Powered by UE4

Personally I enjoy working with Unreal Engine 4 and how we can do things in C++ and then expose it to blueprints or even other way around. With blueprints the game logic is easy to follow and fast to change. Now this is just a small sneak peek of what’s behind the game and what some of it looks like. In the picture below you can see blueprint macros, functions and C++ code that’s exposed to blueprints and some basic minion variables.

Features of Ancestory

As a programmer I like creating mechanics and features similar to what we can see in Ancestory and bringing it all together. For example the card system in Ancestory – How minion cards and spell cards are created and how to make it flexible so that we can later on easily add new cards and mechanics to them or just balance the effects.

Some of you may have either played our alpha version or seen our gameplay video. As you may have noticed, our minion cards didn’t have any descriptions or “special” effects. I’m positive that this will change. Also I’m happy to announce that we have already implemented events that allow minions to have OnSpawn, OnDeath, OnDamageTaken and OnDamageDealt effects. Our system also supports stacking those effects and even adding them to minions with spells. So now it’s mostly about designing and I’m very excited to see what kind of cool stuff we can come up with.

Overall I find our existing code very maintainable so that implementing new features and polishing the existing ones should be a piece of cake. I’m very eager to start working on this again and I feel like I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish with this team as we now have more members and twice the work hours.

Be sure to vote for us for the IOTY2014!

Until next time!

- Joni

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