Bloody Finished

This update will be for yesterday and today since my internet was down. I improved the boss’ attacks. Basically added more and made sure that she attacked differently based on distance. I found a way for an actor to rotate while still under root motion. That means that the boss will not fully track the player during an attack but she can slowly rotate towards the character while attacking.

I created a better sound for the boss’ melee then I added a new action that makes the boss teleport if the player is too far. The boss’ special attack has become kind of a mess but It’s mostly because it is spawning different types of actors. While testing the boss I found that the retry screen was bugged with the power of coming back to life. I had the retry screen tied to the player’s resource bar updating. In other words, it was checking if the player was dead every time the player would take damage or any other time the resource bar needed to be updated. That wasn’t efficient so I made the retry screen appear only when the player died. All I had to do was separate it to its own function/event.

Then I went through the arduous task of implementing the time shadow mechanic to the boss. I tried something else which was having the time shadow use the same animation blueprint. The problem I had with this before is that it will use the same notifies. To get around that I used a boolean that checked whether the time shadow was still “attacking.” It worked okay and it saved time from creating new montages for each animation. Then I had to create a new mesh for the weapon itself and have it play its own montages as well. Since the timing of the time shadow is connected to a timer I couldn’t make the shadow of the weapon disappear unless I assigned an event to it. So I had to create a new event that was called when the time shadow was deactivated. I assigned the shadow of the weapon to disappear on that event.

The boss is quite difficult which is good. And I was able to beat her a few times. Mostly because I have the knowledge of her design which includes her weaknesses and flaws. I improved the visual clarity of the puzzle and I updated the info and image of the stage that the player can see in the journal. There was a function where I had to use a do-while loop because of a list that contained some empty variables. I feel like there were other times where I could have used this but at least I learned it.

The problem with having a single montage for the time shadow is that I have to put the notify telling the attack to play at the end because since it uses the same montage it will affect the weapon’s collision box. Basically, the shadow will make the attack hit when it’s not supposed to it. That’s why I had to make separate montages before. I will test it more another time and if it’s too easy to abuse I will go back to my original method.

I added bloody barrels to use against the boss and I made them float before the boss fight. So far I have no other additions to make to the final level. There is just testing and improving I have to do. I have exhausted all of my good ideas, and I think I have finished the entirety of the basic game. By no means am I close to done but this is a big milestone.