Ghoul Skill Tree

Anthony Palermo - 3/24/2023

Over the course of this week, I have been working on the ghoul skill tree and its accompanying features. I had to design what the skill would do and get most of them functioning. I also had to make the full UI and saving functionality of the skill tree. I also encountered a major bug where the entirety of the lich skill tree stopped functioning.

I first had to deal with making the UI for the ghoul skill tree, which would also need a separate UI widget for the skills themselves. The UI was pretty simple to make, having already made a previous one with the lich skill tree. It was much simpler to redo all the parts in a new UI blueprint from scratch rather than copying and pasting everything.

After getting the UI made I had to attach the skill tree to the Beastiary menu so the skill tree is accessible and make variables for the player to store skill point quantities. I also had to make certain the UI was made when the game started so the player would have unlocked skills if they loaded a save that already had skills unlocked. The last part of this step was making certain the skills would actually be saved and loaded which most of the time on this part was spent making certain everything saved properly.

Around this point I encountered an issue where the Lich skill tree completely stopped working, and I spent a few hours trying to solve it. The issue ended up being the UI blueprint had all it's skill blueprints deleted, which meant none of the skills existed any more. To solve it, I needed to remake them and look back at the video I used in last weeks blog post to get what the skills did and what they cost.

I was working on getting some functional skills which didn't take to great a time working for the simple ones. I was planning on making a skill that slowed enemies near the player and healed the player when they kill an enemy. I had not gotten around to finishing these skills when the team brought up the topic of fixing some fundamental problems with the game, one of which was related to the skill trees and enemies. We talked about adding more basic abilities and more unlockable abilities which would require some fundamental changes to what the skills in the trees are.