The cabin was looking a bit too dark in some rooms so I added lanterns in each area with notable props or things to take notice of. Made the clocks look way more ominous which was unintentional but now good to have. Went back quickly to the intro stage to add the blueprint for the camera to shift to a closer perspective when inside the small rooms. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier but at least I created a blueprint that could be used anywhere. Lastly before any of the addition to the puzzles I fixed the glow on some of the save points because they were too bright and I made sure they disappeared after a few seconds so it wouldn’t obnoxiously take up too much screen space. It appears for a moment to let you know you can save and the text was too distracting. I’ll eventually add something else to make it clear that the save point is available without the use of text.
So the goal of the level I am working on is to break this cypher. It’s not complicated by any means. More of a treasure hunt than actual decoding. Thankfully I already had most of the symbols drawn in my notebook so I drew them on GIMP and made it a transparent PNG so I could transfer as an image into Unreal. I learned about decals quickly so I could add flat textures to objects without having to edit any existing materials. This is extremely useful as I can just add an image to a surface, it’s commonly used for blood splatters and bullet holes. With this I was quite proud of the way it turned out in game. The missing numbers should be intriguing and have the player curious of how to complete it.
Part of the puzzle is a metronome. I won’t say exactly what it’s supposed to reveal. Much of my issues today was getting the metronome to make the clicky sound when it past the center of its axis. I tried many different ways, some way more complicated than I should have been doing, but thankfully the hard way didn’t work out for me. Setting it up was tricky because the way I originally set up the movement of the stick meant that the first time it past the center had a different timing to when it past it the next times, so I couldn’t use the timing of it. I eventually found a boolean logic I had forgotten about which was “nearly equal”. So I had set the sound to go off when the stick’s Y rotation was nearly 0, which was when it was at the center of the metronome, the position it was supposed to make a sound. Turned out pretty accurate and I just had to make sure it made one click per pass since it was on a timeline it sometimes made more than one click.
A last quick update, mostly so I could have another extra cool thing to show in the monthly video was a golem. I bought the model off the Epic marketplace. Slapped a kneeling pose onto it and added it into the scene. Check out the video here.
I’ll continue working on the puzzles to make sure they are all working properly and are not too easy to solve then after that perhaps it is time to work on the next boss.
GoldenGratus Games 