I began the day with another Unreal tutorial on blueprints. This one focused more on the programming aspect of the tool, variables, loops, structs, etc. It showed me how to better manipulate all the objects in the game.
With that I played around with making a new animation for holding up the lantern, as I said I would. There are some kinks in switching between holding it and having it on the hip, but it stays in the hand at least. Also thanks to some Unreal documentation on character blueprints I was able to figure out a way to limit the speed of walking when the lantern is being held. Soon I’ll learn more about how to add character states so gameplay will be smoother. I need these states so it doesn’t look awkward switching back and forth, and it should be clear what state the character is in, idle/lantern/etc.
By some dumb luck I happened upon a video from Unreal about this object called the Cable actor. The video was originally uploaded in 2016, and I assume it’s been in the engine ever since. This is why I should have taken a class or done a proper overview of all the tools of Unreal Engine. Had I found this sooner perhaps I would have gotten more done for the whip development. Anyway at least I finally found something that seems to work well as a whip. It doesn’t act strictly as a weapon, it merely renders the whip and I have to figure out how to translate that into gameplay. Basically creating an invisible impact point of where the cable/whip ends up. So far I have it working to snap back and forth, and pushing objects using a simple collision that appears and disappears.
There was some stuff to figure out at first when getting the whip to look decent when snapping back and forth. I’m happy with the back that I came up with my own sequence in Blueprint to get it looking the way it does. Pictured above is what I put together so that when the mouse is pressed the whip is attached to a certain end point then taken off, the length is changed afterwards to avoid the whip from going all over the place and to simulate it being coiled/pulled back. It’s only going to get more complicated from here. I can’t wait. It should be able to grab small objects, probably for throwing, and also it should act like a grappling hook for swinging or launching the character forward. You can see my test on the lantern and whip here.
GoldenGratus Games 