Feeling Productive

SO this week I managed to get all my goals for the week done, which is a strange feeling for me, as usually it doesn't run so smoothly.

We had a team meeting on Monday where we showed each other what we've done so far and set out new targets for the week.

Mine are to make two terrain textures by the end of the week, finish the day and night cycle and have a lantern made. All of which I've managed to do, so I'm feeling quite proud right now.

But onto the work itself.

I managed to get the time of day to change from evening to midnight. This blueprint did cause me a bit of hassle, because I tried out some more complicated methods of doing this, before settling for a simple timeline as it seemed to work fine. I am worried about finding issues with it later on, but for now it works.

For the final time of day change to morning I decided to do it using a trigger event that loads a new map set to a different time of day. This means I will have to work on creating a loading screen to buffer the freeze time for loading a new map.

Here is my blueprint so far:

Here's the more complicated blueprint I eventually scrapped because simpler is often better right.

To compensate for the lag that occurs when the map changes I also tried to make a loading screen blueprint, it doesn't work yet, and I may scrap it altogether, but here it is (to show that I have been doing work constantly, even though it isn't always visible.

I also initially fixed the flying blueprint by using a trace channel that hits a trigger box which changes the character mode to flying, when you leave this box then you go back to walking. I also added key commands for going up and down by adding a new movement mode. However I had the problem where the character wouldn't stop flying once they left the area, I switched to using sphere collision on my character instead with a sphere trace channel as this blueprint was much simpler, and made it so that when the sphere overlapped the trigger box the movement mode changed once to flying, then back to walking once they'd left the area.

Here is this blueprint:

And here is the mess of a fail before I got it to work.

I also managed to make objects interactable, since that was a major thing the team wanted. Specifically they wanted it to be so that when you interact with an object, a pop up of that object appears on screen. The easiest way to do this, since the object is a script, was to a use a 2D widget that gets created when you interact with it.

I made a special material (with a lot of help I'll admit) that highlights the object when you look at it. Then when you click it, it creates a 2D widget of that script, which you can then close. Finally I use a boolean variable to make it so that you would only trigger the matinee event to clear the players path from the first clearing, once you'd looked at the script, as a bit of a game-play element for the level.

Here are the blueprints:

Checks to see if actor has collided with sphere collision around character:

Creates material instance on object (creates highlight material):

Detects if you are looking at object:

Fades out highlight the further away you are:

Pick up the object and create widget for it:

Detects if you have picked up object and if so triggers matinee event:

In engine I also deleted the character spawn projectile blueprint and character HUD blueprint for firing a gun, since I don't want the character to be able to randomly fire a gun in our game!

This week my main tip for pursuing technical art was learn vector maths! Oh the pain. I kid, I don't mind learning maths since I did a lot of maths for chemistry and found it very fun, I think perhaps what I enjoy is applied maths, which certainly makes technical art right up my street. Plus it's always nice having something that gives you a definitive right or wrong answer, it either works or it doesn't, which is something I do miss when doing art on it's own.

In regards to the lantern, I made a few concepts of different lanterns for different sections of the level. For now though the team decided on one of the designs as a 'general use' lantern, as there are more important things to make than 6 lanterns. For now we can get away with using one that works in all the areas, so I ended up going with the one in the top left.

Here are the concepts:

and modelled it:

Unwrapped it:

And textured it:

Here is the glass I made for it in engine:

Finally my last main task of the week was my terrain textures. Which I'm feeling quite pleased about. They still need tweaking and polishing, but overall I think they do the job well.

Here is my grass one:

Height map

And here is my dirt one:

I think although the first dirt one I made was a place-holder, I've found that a blend between it and my second dirt texture produces quite a nice result, so I'll be using the two together from now on.

Since we had to present our level and I still haven't received any environmental assets I mocked up some real quick trees to literally populate the level to allude to it being a forest. It's pretty messy, but hopefully gets the point across anyway.

Here it is: (pic of level populated)

I've also been focusing on character work this week as we have our formative presentation this week. Therefore I made this concept of my character in game:

And refined my final concept to this:

I also wrote up and practised my presentation. (A lot).

The presentation itself went better than expected, I got mostly positive feedback, with a few suggestions on improvement, which of course I'll take on board. The feedback was mostly to use less words, give my final concept a background, and remove a few slides, all very doable, and will definitely be done.

SO all in all a pretty productive week, there's still a lot to be done though, and unfortunately I haven't been getting any assets to place in engine, however hopefully that'll be rectified soon!