Fought the boss a few more times, testing and found a bug where the AI wouldn’t attach to the actor. I hope I was able to fix it by setting the AI controller when the boss itself is constructed. My changing of the ring model also affected the ring of the cannon. I had forgotten they use the same model. At least that makes it appear more threatening.
I started adjusting all the damages to scale with the player’s health. This was a problem with those playing story mode because no matter how much health I gave the player they would get hurt a lot. Instead I made sure that I took all the damage and converted it to one when the player received it. Through that check I don’t have to worry about making sure any damaging effect is too strong for players in story mode. I went over to all the things that deal damage and made sure they dealt damage that was appropriate to the player’s health. So not much will actually change when the player gains more health. It is the illusion of progress. Which works for me because this isn’t an RPG game where you can pick and choose what stats you want to improve.
I revisited how I handled the life bars of the boss. It was not efficient that I had unique huds for each boss, and if I wanted to change the size and layout it would not match the other ones. I instead added the life bar of the boss to the one HUD of the player. Now it will always have the same size. I just had to figure out a way to update it to each boss and have them appear with unique colors. I was encountering an error with the bars and for some reason the bar wouldn’t work in a function so I created an event which works the same way I need it too. I tested the bottom and the top, and I liked it better at the top. I plugged in the new functions into every boss and I removed some of the old functionality that isn’t necessary. It cleaned up a lot of the blueprints and now I have less to worry about since all I need is in one place. I should always keep it in the same hud so it doesn’t have any strange overlaps.
Once I felt finished with the fourth stage I stuck with I wanted to do and went back to the first stage to begin improving it. A new cycle is what it felt like. I removed a bunch of objects that shouldn’t have been there because I didn’t understand what a “child” object was for. And I updated the models of the barrels since I had nicer ones. I updated the LOD group of the walls to make it architecture. I feel that its lightmap was way too high. But after baking the light it didn’t look too nice so I worked on it a bit more. There was a bug with one of the UI elements. It was because I had my scale box set to the entire screen instead of the box that it was in. It worked fine after that.
I learned a lot of lighting tricks by accident while working on my most recent stage. I used these new ideas in the first stage and it looks a lot better. It didn’t look nice using the fog post process material I had made. Instead I went back to the height fog and adjusted it accordingly. Now it doesn’t suffer from looking too dark and it creates a much nicer atmosphere. Fog fixes everything. There was one object I had left in that was still used for swinging. I am really glad with how everything turned out. Thanks to the reflections on the “glassy” materials it does look like fire at certain angles.
There’s not much work left to be done in the first stage. It was mostly aesthetic improves that I wanted to accomplish. A huge chunk of my work will be on the second and third stage.
GoldenGratus Games 