The new power I added has to do with the perception of time. This ability is based on Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series where certain characters can use this resource called Atium to see shadows that show a person’s possible choices. It was quite the endeavor to get working but eventually I was able to come to a implementation of it that I am happy with so far. It will definitely need continuous tweaking.
I started off by making sure the base character had the capability to show this shadow, so each and every character in the game can have it “activated.” All I had to do was make sure the functionality was in the parent class of the actors. I made sure that the shadow followed the movement of the actor it is on and then I had to think about how to make sure it followed its attacks. From what I’ve implemented I was able to add logic on top of the attack logic I had in order to delay the normal attacks, so I play the shadow attack first.
Worked well so far, but I was using the same animations so some of the notifies were there, the shadow would have the trail, and it was even able to hit the player. It should be purely visual and not affect the player in any way. So, my way to solve this was to duplicate the animations to have their own shadow animation. I hope it won’t be too costly later on when I have more animations. This will definitely be adding a lot more work every time I make a new character.
The shadow was working wonderfully so far, the character would follow through clearly. The timing was a little off but I went around to fix that later on. Before that I needed to actually have the power itself activate the shadow. So I added what should hopefully be the last input of the game to get to the third lantern mode. I made it blue which looks very nice. I also updated the UI so that the image matches the color of the lantern. Then I added a montage that activated the power and I added more logic to the base characters that would activate the shadow. Since it’s more of a perception thing it would activate on all enemies. I may probably need to fix its range later, for now it can work on enemies across the entire level.
I have the shadow counting the attacks it does, so after a set amount it will deactivate. But the player can keep casting to add to the shadow attacks.
To fix the timing of the shadow I tested what would notify the montage, since there was a execution pin that wasn’t working. I found that adding a play montage notify worked to use this pin so I could set exactly at what frame of the animation should the enemy follow through. This way the enemy doesn’t take too long to attack, and for longer attacks the enemy won’t wait for the shadow to finish attacking for itself to finally attack which was one of my first problems.
Adding sound to the casting and effects on the enemy, will add more eventually as I work on this power. For the last few bits I changed it so that the player can shoot while in the air, and made sure they couldn’t cast the time power while they were mid-air.
Tomorrow I will continue refining the power, making sure it works perfectly and that it isn’t overpowered. Essentially it will slow down the enemy’s attacks because it is being delayed by the shadow because of the logic I used. So, better logic, effects, and more coming to it. Plus I still need to add the counterpart to this power which I haven’t actually figured out yet.
GoldenGratus Games 