Windows and things!

I did some work late last night on finishing touches of the interior accents. I continued today on adding window frames. So I had to go back to all the windows I added and replace them. It is a chore but at least it gives me time to listen to a podcast while I do a menial task. For awhile now I wanted something to be in the center of the hall, a tree, or a fountain perhaps. Today I put a statue of a Haunter. It looks nice and shiny. We shall see if I’m going to keep it.

After I was finally happy with most of the interior I finally got started on some functionality of the lantern. I’m happy to report that it can highlight objects. It currently works by having an invisible giant collision box which unfortunately also interacts with other objects, but I can fix that. This is exactly what I wanted for it to do. Under the light of the lantern certain objects will pop out, now I have to figure out if they will have some special interaction. Maybe they will just tell a story through their placement in the world.

The next issue, or obstacle I faced was pointing the lantern towards a direction the camera was facing. I didn’t like how the lantern’s direction was based on solely the direction of the character. I wanted the player to be able to aim it within a certain range so at least you can choose which areas in your vicinity to light up. This way there was also a feeling of uncovering/discovering something yourself. There were some hiccups along the way. I tried it my own way by simply turning the character’s spine towards the direction of the camera, but the problem was that it would break his back. I followed short tutorial that taught me about aim offsets. So I whipped up some animations based on nine different directions that the character could face and put it into the aim offset functionality. Now the lantern arm will move towards where the player is facing in front of him from right to left, up and down.

Here are some pictures of me breaking his back, creating the animations and testing it in the level, along with some cool lighting pictures as well.