My contribution in “Toki Remake”

I was out of my blog for a while, sorry if i made you missing me ^_^ I had some work pressure with some travel outside where I  can not get an easy internet access. I’ve decided to start a whole new UE4 series soon and it is already prepared, but lets keep the topic as a secret for now, but I can expose the reason behind  that interest of making new tutorials. First, my channel now is more than 500 subscribers, which means a lot for me, and it means that I was able to help lots of people some how & they are willing to see more from me The other reason that pushed me a lot was the huge amount of emails; youtube messages, comments; And even Facebook messages..Lots of people thanking me, and others asking for questions or work but the most interesting thing the last group of people, who was showing me the stuff they were able to make with the 2d tools after seeing my tutorials, which really always make me happy. Perhaps when I see it a console game .

One of the people who asked me for work was Anyway GolgothStudio, and as I’m already have a job, and I do like to help indie guys, I decided to contribute with them for free for a while 😉 so It was no any type of pid job. I wanted to write this post today to thank them for those nice days I’ve contributed in Toki, and perhaps those days was the main factor for me to do lots of stuff. As the team never used the engine before, but they do like it & wanna go with it for the game. I was helping them to learn, study & understand the engine and it’s blueprints concept; Make the main character controller & finally help in fixing some engine related issues.

The most important thing I really wanna thank them for, is that putting a huge obstacle in front of me and asking me if I can do something for it. I would like to mention 2 things that I have contributed with them & starting sharing them with all the UE community. The first one was fixing the blanking issue in the animated sprites(flipbooks). As the game might be released before epic fix that issue, it does make sense that any company going to release a game should find their own way around it. So I put it as a high priority for me and worked on it till I got a fix. It was a hard job to dig inside all this millions of unfamiliar code, but at the end I got it done.

The second main issue was the sprites/textures quality. It was looking pixelated & awful. They do use a FullHD assets, but the assets looks strange during the gameplay. I asked them to remove any texture compression that was made for the assets, but the surprise was “textures are nor compressed”, They said. I opened the assets and checked a random amount of them, and I found no compression. I started to make a way around it to for the texture importer, compression & the sprite renderer. I had to say again “God bless you Epic team”, the code is huge…nah it is not…it is HUGE ..(now the word fitting my facial expression !). Anyways, as it was not the high priority for me, I did 70% of the fix. But then I had my issue which forced me to travel outside China for some visa problems & as they are busy & the can not wait for me during that week, I found a thank you letter after getting back home China. So, I wanted to thank them for asking me to help them for a while in remaking one of the most amazing old games & I wanted to show some of the cool stuff I you can achieve with the original source code of the engine…Love you Epic for throwing it in public !

Click on the image to see the difference

For The game itself, I’m sure they will finish it soon & it will be awesome & the logic will be super clean..Why I’m sure ?! Because I taught them well & left them my work files documented as a reference 😛
The good thing that you never expected, they asked me to record while working, perhaps the will release this videos as a free tutorials. And guess what…I did it !!! I’ve lots of videos recorded already but it is full of my kids noise, it will need sometime to add my voice for it, but anyway it is stored in my computer for anytime they asks me for it 🙂 So, be tuned for any updates with the game launch. You might learn how to make a very complex character controllers just using blueprints !

Small part (60%) of the controller I made

One more thing, when I talk a lot about Epic or make tutorials for the engine, thats because I like the engine and the tools they made. It is the same as Unity & any other thing . So please stop asking me if I’m Epic guy -_- I’t is stuff driven by passion of the engine.

m;