I realized I could make a separate event where the trigger of the whip’s disappear could be called again and again. Previously I had it attached at the end which is why it didn’t work well because the timing would overlap to when the whip was appearing. Essentially this works to always make sure the whip doesn’t disappear when it is being used.
For the torches that can’t be saved at I made a quick change to their appearance. Their fires a blue now and I added an extra torch in the first stage to serve as another clue to the “puzzle.” I also quickly changed some of the LOD (level of detail) groupings of some of the objects. Sometimes I stumble on random videos that are quite helpful. These LOD groupings will help optimize the game by making sure that objects will be drawn at a lower quality when possible. There are several different groups from, stage architecture to foliage. Some of the props I had already set to small props without knowing exactly what it did. A long time ago I probably thought it was a good idea, and turns out it was.
I added a handle to the whip! It bothered me how it whip hung straight from the player’s hands. I’ve been watching whip videos for months and it didn’t really register to me that they had a handle, as any weapon would have. So I put a handle and moved the start of the cable to the tip. Upon studying the way that it was held, the people whipping would always hold it at the end of the handle. I made sure the handle did not stick out the back of the hand. With the handle on it looks way more impressive and believable as a whip.
Another thing I realized was that I could also use a timeline as a retriggerable delay if I attached the execute to ‘play from start.’ That way whenever it is called it does whatever it needs to do from the top of it’s timer. For the whip I added logic that would make it shorter over time. A small effect that I thought was cool. When it reaches 0 length it disappears.
Then finally I got to the thing I planned to learn two days ago, which was to make a blood splatter effect. The YouTube video I watched was very helpful and had the files free to download. There were also a lot of helpful comments that improved some of the appearance of the effect itself, which was great. It’s not the most amazing looking effect. It throws a blood splatter into the air and it lands on the ground, leaving a decal in its place.
I learned a lot about using the particle system within the engine. Not enough to be very comfortable with it, but I know enough to at least be able to manipulate the effect that I made from the tutorial. It is a particle effect with collision so it knows where to place the blood splatter when it collides with an object, which will most often be the ground.
I had to make a material, decal material, and a particle for all of it to work. I tweaked it so it wouldn’t shoot out a ridiculous amount of blood.
For quite awhile now I’ve been having an issue with the melee attack firing twice at strange moments. I ignored it and today I decided to get try and finally solve it. Well, it broke my brain for a bit. I added print strings everywhere to find out why it was resetting the attack. The melee attack would overlap which it shouldn’t have been doing because I removed all the combo resets, at least I thought I did. I looked everywhere and I thought the problem was with the whip. So I looked down the functions I had over and over again.
I can’t be sure how long but eventually it dawned on me that I might be resetting the combo in the animation blueprint. When I checked the references for the combo reset, I found that I had attached it to when the character entered the idle state. I vaguely remember doing this, probably because I was frustrated with how the melee attack would not consistently reset. All I had to do was remove it and it worked wonderfully.
Seeing that I have flawed logic plugged into the character. I think I’m going to take more time to go over the sprawling functions I have to make sure there isn’t anything that is unnecessary and broken. I need to trim things down and improve what I have before I started adding more mechanics again.
GoldenGratus Games 