Overview of My Contributions
I mostly was in charge of finding the best way to translate the designer's ideas into code that was doable in the time limit we had of 3 days. This was a challenge as our designer had a tendency to over-scope so my job did entail a lot of choosing what we had to cut for time and what we could feasibly achieve.
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As for implementation, I successfully implemented multiplayer functionality, in a build where unreal engine's default multiplayer function was unfortunately bugged. I created the scoring mechanisms and the UI in which to display them, the graph code and the main menu sequencing. I also implemented the event system with the events individually designed and programmed by my co-programmer.
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I will go more into detail of those individual contributions now along with a demo video showcasing the finished project
Multiplayer
The first half of the code is to recognise how many input devices are connected to the console/PC and create a number of local players equal to that number, taking care not to create more than the game is programmed to handle. I placed four player start actors in the level so the maximum local players that can be created is four and the break is so that it won't create a player when there is no input device to control it.
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In other versions of Unreal, this would be enough to create and assign up to four players to play in the game but unfortunately this version of unreal needed a little extra code.
The second half is handling adding input to players after player 0 (which is handled in the default pawn blueprint) as this is not handled by Unreal automatically in this build. It is all basically an override which allows the other players to use a duplicated version of the player controller without overlapping inputs. Finally it allows the players to possess the correct pawn when level streaming begins as it is easier to set that here without having to tell each pawn individually what player index to expect when it spawns.
Scoring
The largest challenge I faced as a programmer on this project was the score projection on the large screen at the back, the goal was to make it look like a stock graph with the line's height representing that player's score and the colours coded to each player model colour. I could have simply used a plug-in to display an accurate graph based off of a data table with UI widgets, however I really wanted this to be an in world actor so I had to get a little creative with my implementation.
Each player's graph uses an array of 4 squares with the furthest right one keeping an accurate track of the player's score and translating it into a y position relative to the graph depending on the percentage out of the total height of the display. It would then update it's y position based on that percentage in real time, clamped to make sure it did not escape the bounds of the screen.
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Then it was important to update the rest of the squares in the array's height sequentially with a small delay to give the illusion of an updating graph, I did this with seperate arrays where the values would update themselves on 1 second delays cascading down the array as the first value continues to update in real time. This process would of course have to be repeated depending on how many players were active in the game without performing uneccesary work for games where there are not the maximum number of players.
After that was all calculated, it was simply down to drawing the lines between the cubes using a capsule trace by channel and setting the trace to be visable, making sure to colour code the lines to the owning player, this is all done with repeatable functions to save on both blueprint space and coding time, this also makes it much easier to use for other programmers and designers provided they do not need to edit the functions at all.
Reflection
Overall I am very happy with how this project went, in just a short time we managed to make a game that was not only playable but enjoyable. This project managed to win an award for the most on theme game at the jam which was certainly nice for me as the designer of this project. But I also know that we could not have won that award without a game that was memorable and complete feeling.
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For my first ever time experimenting with multiplayer, even just local multiplayer, it presented an interesting challenge to program functionality with multiple people in mind and if I were to program for a multiplayer game again I would focus a lot more on refactoring a lot of the code to reduce how much it is repeated for each player including the checks for player count inside the functions themselves so that they aren't being repeatedly called from elsewhere.
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I was very lucky to be working with another very talented programmer on this project and could not have gotten it done to the standard that we did without them and helping eachother out on this project was a fulfilling and enjoyable experience that I would love to repeat one day with this same group.