A new cycle

Another few days off cause of the new year, but I am back at it. A few more months and it will have been a full year since I started this journey of learning how to code and then learning Unreal Engine. I may have given myself an impossible task of finishing this game. I try my best not to think about it too much and just take it day by day.

As I had planned I started working on the special ability of the whip, and as I expected it was more complicated than the previous skills. Due to the logic of the boss’ movements and attacks I had to make sure that when he was staggered it didn’t move or do a new action if left alone. I also had to make sure the player’s attack would register as a staggering attack. Thankfully I created a very useful interface for damage that sends vital information to the receiver of the attack. This way I was able to tell the boss to do a certain animation to show that it was stunned/staggered.

Eventually I was able to tweak it to where I felt the length of time the boss was staggered was fair, and the amount of power the player uses is appropriate as well. I felt that the boss could use better effects so I edited his aura to make it less cluttered and I added a fire effect to the hammer to really show where the fire balls are coming from. I took a picture of the floor as well to show how awesome the lighting and textures are in Unreal.

The numbers for the boss’ health and the player’s damage and fluctuating constantly. I’m starting to think about whether I want to include different difficulties later on, but I wouldn’t want difficulties simply being number adjustments. So I have to figure out the magic balance one day. I also quickly looked up how to limit the range of the camera movement because I didn’t like how the camera could go under the character’s leg. I found that there was a way to clamp the view of the camera so you can decide how far it goes up, down, left, and right. 35 for the pitch max seemed to be a good value for the time being.