I spent the day looking over the blueprint I have for the main character. I went around cleaning up the functions as much as I could while also deleting things that were irrelevant and unnecessary. There were a few things that I simplified and others that I improved.
Made sure a lot of the wires were straight and easy to understand, especially those that have to overlap each other. I identified some actions that would break other actions just as trying to pull out the lantern while jumping will cause the player to never be able to pull the lantern, so I pushed back the do once node.
The lantern’s rotation was actually set to higher than the default rotation. This was set during the time that the rotation of the character was limited to about 180 degrees. I slowed it down to match the speed at which the player moves with the lantern.
I found there was a bug with trying to pull out the shield while attacking, you couldn’t do it because it would immediately cancel the shield. After making sure that it knows that the player is no longer attacking if the shield is out, the player should now be able to block in the middle of an attack.
The parry is a difficult action to pull off if you aren’t familiar with timings, I didn’t give enough reward for getting a successful parry. Now if a player successfully parries, they also get some lantern light in return.
I created a function that could easily take in a color and change all the appearances connected to the lantern. Not sure why I didn’t do this before, it helped tremendously with cleaning up the functionality of the power changes.
With the speed up power I stayed away from increasing the speed because I had so many problems previously with setting and resetting speed, but now that I have strict functions that always handle the setting of speed I can easily change and reset speed on the fly. I updated the blendspace for the movement so that the animation will match all the proper speeds and directions. Improved the time at which the player’s speed stays up when they use the power and I made sure their speed would be as fast as a sprint and even faster if they sprinted while using the power. Small changes, but I made sure it worked together with the speed resets.
When using a controller I found that it was much harder to turn the camera when time slows down. This is when the player would be pulling an object and trying to throw it in the direction the camera is facing. To try and remedy this I increase the sensitivity of the gamepad when time slows down then I reset it when everything goes back to normal.
I removed the old camera functionality I had on the heavy attack because it was quite wonky and got in the way of the current camera movement I had. While it was cool it was out of place among all the logic I had. Maybe in the future I will work more fancy camera movement into the combat, but right now I will keep it simple and within my grasp.
Unreal engine has a great way to find references within blueprints. I made sure to go down the variables I had to check which ones were not being used. I had a few that I made awhile back that weren’t found anywhere so I deleted those. The swing variables I saw very quickly, I thought I had deleted them before but I guess not. I also moved around the visual and audio effects of the whip hitting actors, its timing felt wrong to me. Making it earlier in the function of the whip seemed to make it more appropriate.
There are a few things I want to change and improve in the other levels. And there are a lot of things I want to figure out for the world itself. There’s lots of lore I want to flesh out to make the story itself or at least the details of the powers more compelling. So I will be working on that for the next few days.
GoldenGratus Games 