Archive:
I have a stinking cold. Not happy. Laid out Master Bedroom (in between the sneezing) so the day wasn’t a total write-off.
The room’s fairly simple: bouncing on the bed will ping you up into the next room. I need a mat and some more props in there (maybe some magazines/books), but it’ll do as a first pass.
The ceiling has some platforms you can double jump onto if you have the wand. I’ve hidden a doorway up there as well.
I was going to force the player to do a jump-cancel, above the bed, to incrementally increase the height of the bounce, but decided against it. 1) that sorta thing requires more explanation than this single room could provide & 2) I’m definitely leaning toward keeping the main path super-simple, so kids (and my SO) stand a chance of getting through it. I’ll use tricks like jump-cancel in the hidden areas, if at all.
Also, re-modelled the geometry in First Landing, so the ball doesn’t get stuck when rolling down narrow paths. I didn’t like how it was highlighting the flaws in my Not Monkey Ball.
Ugh, snot keeps falling out of my face. I’m not a happy camper, but I needed to do something productive without breaking anything, so I made a start on Sandy Whites.
I always wanted this to be full-bore Sega Blue Skies. Nicely lit, overly saturated and shiny as UK Resistance would require. And I think I’ve made a decent start. I got very, very close to the canonical Sega Blue, even if you’ll never see it…
Unlike the other zones, I want the rooms in Sandy Whites to be visible (rather than fade in and out), floating over a desert. Why a desert? Well, I want to rob Jeff of some of his Llamas, and there were a few Aztec themed 8bit games back in the day, so it feels like fertile ground.
(Future Gareth: yeah, about those always visible rooms…)
I’m doing a similar trick to Captain Toad: There’s a ground plane at the bottom – with a rubbish sand texture that I need to replace – that fades out, based on the distance to the camera. The cloud plane, which animates slowly and sits just below the room geometry, does the same fade-out trick, and between them they give a nice parallax effect when you move the camera. The rest of the sky is the same as Willy’s Mansion, but with a day-time material and the stars turned off.
I think this’ll work on the Switch without too much bother, but I’ve not tested it…
(Future Gareth: Nah, the overdraw was a bit too much. The clouds ended up being removed on low and medium settings.)
Everything’s setup on the code side; new GameMode, new level blueprint, and the character runs about. It’s good to go.
Still feeling sub-par, but I made some decent progress on The Attic. I’ve got the basic layout as I want it, but it’s not populated with NPCs. Or cobwebs. It needs lots and lots of cobwebs…
Rigged up the Bat model from Maenhir (wow, finally) and animated a flap cycle. Added three Bats, on various splines, which gives traversal across the room a smidge of timing spice. Immediately wanted the bats to be able to bomb out some poos if they’re above the player, so that’s on the TODO list.
The Bats use the spline following code I wrote the other week, except I’ve tied it up, added it to the NPC’s plugin, and converted it to use a DataAsset that’ll support automatic configuration of Static Meshes, Skeletal Meshes with Anim Blueprints, or Skeletal Meshes with a looping Animation Asset. They’re drag-and-drop, in the editor, zero faff.
Made the bed in the Master Bedroom launch the Player Character when jumped on, and added a trigger above it to do the room transition, up to The Attic. This uncovered a race condition in the way I was applying and removing Gameplay Tags from Force Based Interactives (springs, fans, hoovers), which took a bit of code-stepping to nail down. Of course, it ended up being a one line fix.
Also added a placeholder room, “Under The Attic”, with a teleporter, that’ll return you to the Hub.
Technically, that’s the initial flow I laid out back at the start of the project “done”. 40 rooms & one ‘bonus’ – the Uridium inspired shooter – after which you’ll have collected the Wand, the Double Jump, and unlocked Sandy Whites.
Except it needs a lot of polish. There’s audio missing, NPCs are missing, a fair amount of set dressing is missing, and one room’s missing a puzzle. But you can walk through it all, and get a feel for the shape of it.
Made a build, gave it a solid play, and found and fixed some bugs.
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