First two weeks progress

Hello to anyone who actually reads this. 

So my goal with these is to put out an update detailing my progress each week until the project is released. I'm going to strive to get these done on Fridays but since this is the first one I'm doing it's going to double up and cover my first two weeks of progress. Anyways with all that out of the way here's what I've accomplished since starting on shmup number 2 on 6/13.

First up is that I used my last shmup as a base and moved over a bunch of the code so I could reuse it. Eventually I would like to make these things part of a plugin so that I can migrate them more easily. After doing that I blocked out two basic levels, which you can see below, and I made sure that the menus transition between them correctly. I also ended up adding new trigger actors that allow me to transition levels when overlapped by the player. In addition to this in my first shmup I scrolled the background and the enemies while the player was stationary. This time around I've attached the player to the camera and made the camera scroll.

I made a basic enemy model. They're just stationary in the world right now and they're big bullet sponges.

I modeled and added some basic animation for a new player ship. The model also contains bones for the option positions and I spawn and attach option actors at them.

I reused the bullet spawner components I wrote for the enemies on my last shmup for the player shots and I was able to make a fairly interesting player primary shot.

Finally I began work on the lasers that I'd like to use throughout the world and have fired by enemies and players. I took the plunge and attempted to make the particle effects in niagara instead of cascade which has been quite the learning curve and I'm not happy with the results yet but I'm sure it'll be the right move going forward.

I also managed to start implementing the lasers in level but they don't look pretty yet.

Finally I worked on adding some more interesting enemy flight patterns.

That's it for the half way point and it still feels like there's a mountain of work to do. Hopefully I'll be back next week with more progress.