Operation Vyce | Week 2: 9/6/2026

This week was pretty productive, with most of my focus being on the Weapon Pickup System. With a few small tweaks I am confident I can switch to prototyping the melee system in full.

What I accomplished

Pickup System

• Created weapon pickup actor, which drops on Q or when a new weapon is picked up while another is equipped.

• Got weapon switching working under the 'single weapon at a time' framework.

• Added colorful overlay material to weapon pickup actor that indicates when it can be picked up.

• Added a grab animation when switching weapons and a drop animation when switching to unarmed.

• Added rotation and floating animation to pickup actor

• Added interact prompt that appears when you can pick up a weapon, and it dynamically changes depending on the name of the weapon you are hovering over.

Melee System

• Added punch animations, which trigger sphere traces

• Added temporary punch sounds

Challenges

• learning how to change the size of skeletal meshes on import

• Learning transforms, and the difference between absolute and relative position

• couldn't figure out how to add an equip animation to make the weapon slide up from the bottom of the screen. going to reinvestigate in future weeks.

• learning how animation blueprints work and how to set animation states.

• issue with pickup outlines applying but not removing themselves when looking at the actor.

What I still want to do

• Set up Version Control for the Project

• Add some temporary sounds to the pickup system

• Edit sounds for movement system (landing and footstep)

• Add a prototype crosshair

• Get Melee System fully prototyped with unarmed melee and armed melee

My Thoughts

I feel that I made good progress this week by fully implementing the weapon pickup system mechanically. I need to polish it a bit more but the base is solid. I hope to have the melee system up and running by the next Devlog, but I start a part-time job this thursday and I am unsure of the exact impact this would have on the time commitment I can dedicate to this project.

I will update this post with a Video demonstration of the implemented features