UE5 & Technical Demo

We transferred the code to UE5 (Unreal Engine 5) from Unity and worked on the hardest mechanism that our game carries for our technical demo which is the cat AI and how to stop it from getting to the treats. We worked on building the scene/environments, started a simple cat AI that collects treats, and added drop and pickup functionality for obstacles/distractions that could be used to stop the cat from picking up treats, a timer, and a scoreboard. We also were able to add in the cat audio which is just a "meow"!

Our next steps are refining the scene to what our concept art would want, and testing around with different cat AIs  (perhaps it's just straightforward and silly, or maybe we want a more challenging AI for the user) to see what works to enhance the gameplay. We want to focus on optimizing one level at first and want to get the core gameplay down to ensure that our game is fun in the first place. 

While our game feels very simple at the moment, the cat AI and how we'll stop it will be an incremental process that we'll need to work on throughout this term. And of course, we'll need user feedback in terms of how we can optimize this gameplay. We've discovered that Unreal Engine is a bit more difficult to set up than Unity, especially the GitHub for Unreal. A lot of time was spent on this setup, and we're still having trouble setting up UE5 on a Mac which we're already on the role of resolving ASAP with the help of mentors so we can have a smooth workflow for the coming deadline next week.