Week Summary - BA2a Week 5

Game Project

This week I fleshed out a lot of the level to make it feel a bit more like a proper environment, adding some motion-activated lights, other props and some small test objects for the player to clean. 

I also imported a rough model of the robot character to give me a better idea of how it would look finished. This actually ended up showing me a problem with the pawn rotation, as it was facing in one direction constantly while playing regardless of which way it was moving. This was fortunately easily solved by checking the "orient rotation to movement" setting in the character movement, although it's still a bit snappy and I think would need a lerp node somewhere to smooth it out. For now though, this is working as much as I need it to.

My initial attempt at solving the rotation issue before finding the "orient rotation to movement" setting

With help I also managed to get a rough 'voice over' system working, in the style of Portal's GLaDOS, which runs over the top of the game to provide instructions and feedback, as well as a bit of comedy. The blueprint is set up so that each trigger box will send a different string of text to the UI when overlapped, although currently I'm having trouble with different dialogue pieces overlapping each other if the player triggers the boxes in quick succession before the previous one has finished speaking. I've tried to set a condition that the text won't fire if it's already firing somewhere else using a boolean, but I've been having some trouble getting it to work across all the blueprints, I think because the variable is tied to each instance rather than being universal.

Result of text cast to UI

Here I managed to fix the issue I was having with the door allowing itself to be opened multiple times and becoming offset by using a DoOnce node which resets when the animation finishes. There are some extraneous nodes here as well which I will clean up later.

Asset Creation

I worked on some highpoly zbrush models for my door this week. I didn't put too much detail into them because I wanted to focus on the game project, just some general wear and scratches and some simple carvings.