Over the past few days I've been encountering the different problems that are coming with my goal of making this game for mobile. The first problem is that the game runs very poorly. I've determined that this is likely because it is constantly destroying and creating new actors as the game runs. A possible solution to this that I found is to set up an 'Object Pool' that the engine moves actors around from without having to load them more than once, at the start of the map. The only problem I'm facing here is that I have no idea how to create one and the only help I've managed to find is an example setup that I can't pick apart easily to understand, or even get to work properly.

Problem number 2 is that the lighting looks terrible. When setting up a game for mobile the best way to get the lighting to look nice is to have a small area set up in a 'Lightmass Importance Volume'. The problem with this is that with the setup I've made for my infinite runner the character quickly leaves this zone and things start looking terrible. Stretching the zone of the Ligthmass results in worse quality light overall and the zone would need to be infinite to account for the characters available movement space, which obviously would not work. A solution I thought of for this is to attempt to have the map move instead of the character; keeping the same illusion, but allowing for the lightmass to stay stationary. Again my only problem here is that I don't know how to go about coding this and have had no luck so far finding any help doing so.

What's becoming clear is that I've reached the end of Prototype number 1 and will need to start again with a better understanding, however I'm not certain where or how to start yet and I'm not making much progress. I'll update with any results in the future.

I've spent the last couple of days attempting to convert the game prototype into Mobile format and set up mobile controls. Sadly I was unable to find much help with how to set up mobile controls, especially tilt controls, and spent a lot of time attempting brute force trial and error; learning what each thing did as I went along.
I was able to find a few images of setups that worked for people and used these to help piece mine together:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/390439/how-can-i-use-tilt-sensor-in-ios-ipad-to-steering.html
​https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/35512/how-to-use-tilt.html

In the end I was finally able to create a working prototype that allows me to control the characters left and right movement by tilting the phone left and right, with swipe left and swipe right turning corners, and finally swipe up as jump. I requires a large chain in the blueprint editor and was not easy or fun to set up.
Image of Character Blueprint:

You'll see in the image that there are a few unlabelled event chains, from where I attempted different ways of reading the tilt input, that I wasn't happy with and deactivated.

Another thing that I managed to get set up is the ability to test a map I've made on my phone. This means that each time I make a change to the control scheme I can check what effect it has on the game directly on my phone, using the tilt inputs and swipe functions.

My only concern now is that when I set up the project I didn't originally select mobile, but rather switched to it later and I think this has led to my lighting being broken. I have spent a lot of time looking for some sort of fix for this, however I think my solution will have to be to start the project again and copy over the function chains from the original. This won't necessarily be difficult but it will, however, be quite time consuming.

Today (technically yesterday) I got carried away and a little too exited about creating this game and spent the whole day, or at least 10 hours of it, creating a prototype level in Unreal 4. I followed the tutorial videos from the earlier post and then expanded on it; adding more map pieces, changing the spawn placements of the obstacles and coins and quantity of each, playing with lighting, and planning wall/building placements for when a theme is in place. I even did a lot of bug testing to fix problems such as being able to turn 180 and fall off the map if you tricked the box trigger. There are still a few problems I'm aware of and will likely fix soon, including certain walls not triggering the 'Death' event correctly.

Below is a link to an executable of the game in it's current state. Let me know if the download is broken or the game won't start as you will need to unzip the file. If need be I can upload an unzipped version, it will just take up more dropbox space.

Game Files: Here.

Controls are:
A - Move left. Turn left at corner.
D - Move right. Turn right at corner.
Space - Jump.

Be warned that the game has no pause screen or exit button so you will need to either use Alt+Tab or Alt+F4 to exit the game.

So following on from the earlier research I have now drawn out rough map piece plans for the game. I have drawn at least 2 different layouts of the buildings/walls on each piece, with the main pieces being:
straight tile, right turn, left turn and a junction piece. I will likely add ramps or stairs leading up or down and space them throughout as well. I thought more about the theme and setting and; although I haven't come to a conclusion yet, I like the idea of a modern Victorian look with different stone walls and fences lining parts of the path and possibly gaps for views of park areas while your character runs. I'll have to look into if there are any areas similar in real life, and if not then consider what the balance between looking modern and looking Victorian will be. I also need to think about why the character is there, why they're running, etc.

I'll upload the images mentioned in a future post, as I plan to do more work on them very soon.

So today I started researching how possible my plan for my upcoming final year project is going to be and found promising results. I managed to find a very helpful and detailed step by step on how to make a basic prototype for an 'infinite runner' game in Unreal Engine 4. The idea I had for my project was to create a simple mobile phone game with entirely custom assets and hopefully an animated introduction. This tutorial has confirmed that I should be able to create a basic working template for my game within 2 or 3 days, allowing me to focus my work time on the assets themselves and get them to a quality I will be happy with.
Next in my plan is to start brainstorming some ideas for the setting and story of the game so that I can get some sketches done of possible scenery and obstructions to the character.

Here is a link to the tutorials I have watched:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/PLZlv_N0_O1gbY4FN8pZuEPVC9PzQThNn1/

Today I woke up with a made up tune stuck in my head and thought I'd take the opportunity to try out what software there was available for making music for my project this year. 
After trying out a few different options and even attempting to play the guitar again for the first time in at least a year, I settled on a piece of software called Stagelight.
It has an array of different instruments available that you can loop endlessly and transition into eachother; it's perfect for making simple music loops for a simple game or animation.
After I made something with the tune I had in my head I went on to make a second one to try and learn the software better. Both are available in .wav form below:

Soundtrack_test_1
​Soundtrack_test_2
​
​Software creators website.

I decided to test my ability to create life-like idle poses during this holiday. I used a free model that I found on the internet which has a really well-made rig, though I'm not a huge fan of the models head. I'm happy with how the animation turned out, with my only concern being that if it were used in a game the loop would be too frequent and therefore noticeable. I plan to make an idle that links to this one seamlessly so that it could alternate between them and help make things less noticeable.

This is my first post on this blog. Mainly testing that it works and that I can set up the correct categories. It should help me to organise my work throughout the year and remember to post the side work that I do for fun.