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Weekly Summary: 5
At the beginning of the week a primary focus was modelling a harp in Maya, as I'm wanting key items to either be a single colour in a black and white world, or 3D to really stand out and feel like they don't quite belong in the game world. I began blocking out a harp...
...to soon learn that there's a far more economical way of approaching that which would only appear from one angle, I was telling myself that unwrapping would be a simple case of using a single planar, but I don't even need to do that. I learned that if I used a single poly plane and projected a diffuse, an alpha, specular and normal map onto it, no modeling was required! Adding a convex curve pushed it out a little bit more, adding a little more dimension.
And with a little specular...
Its a minor but useful change. Very time efficient and I'll be working on putting this in the game with perhaps a few tweaks!
World Swapping and Movement Modes
As so far I only had one world which you could run about in, and needed a second identical world, I copied and dragged out a new one, switching up the colours for now. I'd also fleshed out and finished the geography for my map.
The prospect of creating the float mode perplexed me, I thought I'd need loads of different nodes and inputs, when all I needed was an ascending Z axis input and setting my character to "flying", a mode already in UE4.
Battling with nodes and much rewiring of connections allowed the teleport to happen and floating to only occur in the other world, having to use some basic maths to work out the exact unit the character needed to move.
An error that was occurring consistently, was that being hit by an enemy in the purple world would teleport you back to the original one, meaning that when you try to swap, you're in black space due to the co-ordinates that had been programmed. So I decided to copy the enemy blueprint and have a separate set of enemies in the second world, that will launch you to the beginning there, using adjusted co-ordinates.
Collectibles and Other Mechanics
At this point I was also trying to implement collectibles and the ways of "winning" my game. Collecting orbs, small suns, from key locations within the map is how you can reach the end gate at the top and have it let you leave. There'll be seven orbs in the game, but only 3 are needed to escape, so you don't have to explore every nook and cranny to get them all, this will also lead to variation in people's playthroughs, people will be able to use different routes to each other and have slightly altered experiences and encounters. The harp, currently a blue, stretched, platform sprite can be collected via hitbox by walking into it.
The harp itself is proving difficult to set up. Once collected, pressing R should propel enemies that would otherwise reset your position away from you, essential for getting past certain rooms. Many methods have been tried, even changing the enemies from actor to pawn blueprints, yet I can't seem to get it all working quite yet.
The enemies need to be pushed in a radial fashion; i'm hoping to achieve this very soon.
Another current struggle is setting up the interactions for Death, I'm aware I need to use text arrays and a widget blueprint to set up UI for option selections, but the tutorial im following is providing fruitless results. The text and options are far less complicated than what I'm following, I'm really rather stuck with this currently.
The gist of the "conversation" will be either leaving him, but not before collecting an orb, or doing as he says and giving up.
The other way of winning and collecting orbs to escape has also proven difficult to achieve, I've set up the variables and nodes and have a boolean in place that checks to see if you've got the right amount to end the game, but I'm unsure as to why its not working.
Another kink to iron out, but I'm confident in fixing theses issues promptly and I feel like I'm finally learning the logic and language of nodes.
I'm slowly setting up differences in item, npc and enemy locations n the separate worlds, visual polish will cement this.
After battling with Spriter and being robbed of my walk cycle, I simply set it up again, to create a flipbook in UE4 to have my own character walking and flying around the map.
In summery, I tackled most of my mechanics this week and whilst I have a few glaring issues to fix ASAP, I should have my core game finished very soon, aesthetics need to be tackled hard next week.
Some stray doodles about the first room, enemies, death and general ideas:
I'll end this post with coming clean about what my game is really about as well, as its such a personal issue I've been wanting to avoid it. This game is very much about manic depression, namely my own, and im trying to express my own reality here. The enemies are bad notions that land you at square one, there is a literal "rock bottom" where you can talk with death and most of the text spouted by npcs have deep personal links. Masks are a big motif, comedy and tragedy, and they're more personified than the people wearing them- representative of the persona we project to others. This project is rather self indulgent and is a projection of self, the game is intended to be more metaphorical and artistic than pure fun. I've long regarded games as art, but its only through making one have I seen the breadth of creative possibilities in design.
Finally, this is also a dedication to my grandfather, a fellow thespian, artist and sufferer. I'm hoping to put some of his paintings in the game, to have a little virtual room in dedication to him. He had a penchant for the comedy and tragedy masks, I see it only fitting to use them in my game, as they summarise binary moods so well,
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