Found a nice plugin that makes a loading screen appear between levels with no trouble. But the trouble for my project has been packaging the game with plugins. It happened with the destructibles and it happened with this as well. It may be caused by the fact that everything I have is run through blueprints. I can’t be too sure yet. So for now I went back to my normal loading screen because the level streaming system wasn’t working to show the loading screen when I wanted it to.
I won’t give up on figuring out why the plugins won’t work with my packaged material. I just have to do more research. Before I start working on the fifth stage there is a lot I want to clean up. Especially because a lot of my earlier code was very messy. And I probably want to do my own play testing because I am still finding some bugs such as a text that shouldn’t appear on a screen. I fixed it by disabling it after everything within the function is called.
Looking over some of my other work I found that I made too many unnecessary functions for ending a boss fight. I simplified it by reducing some of the events that I call.
I knew there was a lot of things within the characters, especially the base character that I could simplify. I started with the hit react because I ended up calling it on every character. It wasn’t present in the base so I made changes to how the hit reaction event worked. To make it clear for me I changed the names of the variables to include “(Base)” so at least I immediately know where it’s from. The benefit of putting it on the base character is that I can clean up the other blueprints. But I had to also fix the animations blueprints which didn’t take too long.
The blueprint of the first boss is a total mess. There was a lot I cleaned up and even deleted. I also put another event within the base that called a stagger event. This was another thing I had on all characters but it wasn’t in the base. There is so much more I can probably put in the base to make it easier for me going forward.
I was also launching the player a lot so I created a function that I could easily call that takes in an X, Y, and Z. Then it also has two other floats that determine the power those floats are multiplied by.
I’m going to continue by work on the character base because I know there is more I can improve upon to make it even more efficient when I create new characters. If I can make it fairly easy it can open up a lot more possibilities and definitely make it less time consuming whenever I make a new character.
GoldenGratus Games 