Primitive Protection has progressed a considerable amount since the last update. If you hadn’t heard of the project before I’ll give you a quick rundown. Primitive Protection is a multiplayer, wave survival shooter where you can build your own base and survive against hordes of gnomes as a time traveling prehistoric human. Firstly, I have implemented multiple forms of artificial intelligence. Initially I trialled a prebuilt AI from a pack which was incredible. It was very versatile and quite performant. Unfortunately, it wasn’t versatile enough for me as I needed core parts of the AI to be completely under my control. So, after sticking with the pack AI for a considerable amount of time I made the difficult decision to create my own. Which surprisingly was a lot easier than I had figured initially. I created several distinct types of AI and models for them as well. I created a quick gnome, a large gnome, a ranged gnome, and a kamikaze gnome. All within relatively quick succession.

After programming that in blueprint I decided to create weapon functionality in the game. This started off incredibly simple but then branched out to being quite a sophisticated system, well as sophisticated as I can get… The system is still integrated with the character blueprint and likely won’t be expanded to its own parent class anytime soon, but it is very functional for now, I have weapon switching working and each weapon has ammunition and reloading mechanics inbuilt. Additionally, each weapon has a separate firing animation and reloading animation.

Also, I made an upgrades system for the game where once you eliminate enough gnomes you level up and can choose an upgrade for your character. It doesn’t look all too nice right now, but it is functional.

An exceptionally large change I made to the initial game that was third person is that I changed to first person. This change is simply because first person kind of felt better, more intuitive, more engaging. Though there were some major problems with switching which affected my building system and also my animations. Fortunately, I fixed it by changing a bunch of settings related to the camera. I have also created a death and revive function for the character that doesn’t quite work with multiplayer yet, but it does function theoretically.

I have also changed how I am managing the game, switching to an external solid-state drive to store everything about it. I used the sponsorship money from the AAAF (Australian Alopecia Areata Foundation) to purchase a $250 dollar SSD that has a 2tb capacity, well enough to store the game and plenty more.

Additionally, as much as I said last time that the announcement of the game would be before the next update, I am a perfectionist and have had a tough time doing the announcement. Though, I am quite confident it will release in the next one to two weeks as it has been all I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks. Right now, I am in the final stages of editing after re writing the script a few times and re-recording the video twice.

That’s all the major updates I added to the game, I hope it will be finished in the next few months!

Connor was a part of our sponsorship program – you can also participate! Go here to learn more https://aaaf.org.au/sponsorship-program