Archive:
Still working on The Hall. Have a carpet, fireplace, picture frames, doors and some basic lighting.
Decided to use hidden shadow casters, placed around each interior room because, as the room rotates and the walls disappear, they take their shadows with them and that looks very odd.
Rob Fearon’s going to doodle the portraits for the picture frames, hurrah! :D
I think I’ve got The Hall where I want it. Added some paint pickups, a height-based ceiling (invisible until you’re high enough), the predator-style pickups (invisible until you’re close), fixed the lighting, added chandeliers (with candles), some Wand Interactive platforms, and a better placeholder step in the doorways. (Future Gareth: Oops, I shipped that placeholder.)
I’ve given the paint pickups an optional blob shadow. The default isometric view makes their location difficult to read, especially the cocktail glasses. The blob helps give them some placement. Assuming players notice the blob.
The only thing left to add is a pipe, that’ll shoot you to First Landing. I’m thinking First Landing and Top Landing could be Monkey-Ball-style levels. I had a few ball related shenanigans in the first game, so Monkey Ball would be a nice spin on them. Ahem.
The Chapel is laid out. Went with the OG textures from the first game.
The stepping stones need to break when you stand on them, and I need to add a route back, once you have the wand. Oh, and at some point there’ll have to be a cut-scene when you collect it.
It feels like you’re getting the Wand a little quickly, atm, so I’m going to put Priest’s Hole before The Chapel, make that a long path with obstacles and simple timing jumps. It can’t be too fiddly, as it’s potentially early in the game.
Hmmm.
Today started well enough; I dressed The Chapel with decals, added floor spikes and made a start on the crumbling blocks. They should be easy, right? I’ve made them three or four times before…
Banged out the C++ class, it compiled. Made the base Blueprint. Popped out to drive my partner around on some errands. Came back, placed a few, and for the life of me I couldn’t get their Trigger to fire any events. Wut?!
Lesson of the day: setting the relative location and scale of components in code, then scaling the actor in a Blueprint, is not going to do what you think will. My triggers ended up being inside my mesh. Worse, this looked fine in the Blueprint constructor, but was broken in the map. Sigh.
Game dev’s weird, as the easiest things can trip you up. I was annoyed with myself in the evening, but it’s a decent reminder: when you’re hammering at the thing, you’re going to hit your thumb.
Hit my thumb.
Thought I had a great idea for The Priest’s Hole: a long-ish room, with levels at three different heights. Each level would have its own traversal requirement; Jump Box to get up, timed jumps on moving platforms, and another Jump Box to block NPC Rats from biting your ankles.
I blocked it all out, made the new modular pieces I needed for the room, did the basic setup, ran around in it… and… it looked shite. It would maaaaybe work if the camera was unlocked, except that won’t be the case the first time you get to these rooms. And worse, I’d need to put collision detection on the camera to stop it clipping through geometry. Wasted 2/3 of the day on that. Ho-Hum.
Decided to simplify it, and split it into three discreet rooms. Got the first room laid out this afternoon. I’ll tackle the others next week.
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