Added more vegetation on all the buildings. Such small fine details maybe some people won’t even notice! But I like it even if it doesn’t always fit perfectly. After that I added traps all around the stage. It was tedious work but it had to be done to make going around quite annoying for the player. My goal for this stage is to make the player uncomfortable.
I sat for awhile staring down at the level from a bird’s eye view. I couldn’t help thinking I was missing something. That’s when I got the idea of adding an attack that targets the player if they are traversing the rooftops. So the player has traps to deal with on ground level, and this cannon firing from up high. While starting off on the cannon for some reason a part of it collided with the player even if I turned the collision off. It made it the camera’s perspective go to first person while it was beside the player. I removed the component that blocked the player and it worked fine.
How it works is that I have it track the player and the ring grow smaller to show that it is about to hurt. This gives the player the time to maneuver away. It was fairly simple, and I’m proud of how quickly I can make new dynamic objects now that do interesting things. So it tracks the player then it does damage. I used a timeline so I can adjust the time easily without having to worry about getting any specific timings right with the ring size.
I added effects and made sure there was a visible “cannonball” that showed up. It doesn’t really do anything, but serves as the visual cue that it is dealing damage, along with the explosion of flames as well.
I ran into to an issue where the collision for the cannon suddenly wasn’t working but I fixed it by making sure it only overlapped with pawns. I created another blueprint that checked if the player entered a certain area. This would take care of firing the cannon at the player if they are roof level then it would stop shooting if they went back to the ground. It worked wonderfully and it is a fun mechanic to run around dodging these cannonballs.
The cannonball looked strange when it was hurling through the air so I made sure it went far past the point on which the explosion was happening. I made it go towards a point in space far away so it would appear as if it was travelling very fast without stopping.
I went back to the sounds I downloaded and I was lucky that there was a nice cannon firing sound inside. I attached it to an area on the level and with attenuation I was able to make sure the player would be able to hear it only if they are close.
The stage is coming together very well.
A few more improvements and updates to the stage then I can start working on the boss. I’ll start with the model design and then work on the fight itself.
GoldenGratus Games 