Archive:
Started doing some tidy-ups and re-orgs for my August milestone. Went back through Moon Base, added a placeholder cut-scene for the collection of the double jump, and two additional rooms that force the player to use it. Also removed one of the robots from the Impossible Mission room and added an extra moving platform, so it’s easier to get to the exit.
Textured the crates I placed yesterday. Following on from the theme of the first game, where the crates were “A.C.&G Ltd” – for Ashby Computers & Graphics – these are, “Ultimate Move The Stuff”. I should really put a Pickford Bros destructible in here, and double-bubble the removals joke.
I’m a lot happier now these two rooms are in.
Went back to Willy’s Mansion and added “Further West of the Kitchen”. Technically, it’s not a room from the Jet Set Willy games, but I’m at the point where I’m happy to take some liberties. This one re-purposes the sinking platforms (from Moon Base) into floating bars of soap. I added some bob, rotation, and splash VFX, but mechanically it’s the same thing. I’m reasonably sure I can re-purpose the bouncers into floating bubbles…
The plan to re-purpose the bouncers into a bubble worked better than I expected. Added a bit of logic to make them float / timeout, and job done. I changed the bars of soap to be twiddlers, so when you stand on one, they twiddle a switch, and that spawns a bubble. Bloop!
Everything has audio, and particle effects. I added a shelf to indicate where the secret door is (same rule as the first game!) and made a four-foot tall bottle of Mr Matey, as a bit of a visual gag.
The bubble and the water don’t z-sort particularly well, especially when the bubble’s spawning. Not sure if there’s much I can do about that (they both refract), but I’ll fiddle with it later.
Playing with the bubbles uncovered another inconsistency with the double jump. Occasionally, the character wouldn’t float, and dropped like a stone. I thought this might be related to a stale Gameplay Tag left by the forced jump (which I removed) but it turned out to be three bugs. The other two in the animation blueprint.
Quick [[Week 8-FIXED]] refresher: Each of the "xxx Selector" nodes is an Animation State Alias. They’re handy because they let you blend into the next animation state, without the need to drag lines everywhere, repeating transition logic. But you need to make sure the alias has the correct list of anims ticked, and the Normal Jump To Float Selector was missing an animation. If you jumped off the ground from your right foot, you could enter JUMP TO FALL. If you jumped off from your left foot, you couldn’t. That rippled out, occasionally preventing a bounce from entering Float, which broke all the things.
The third bug was in the Forced Jump Selector’s transition. If the character’s jump status, in code, is FORCED_JUMP, it’ll transition into the animation. But that’s only the case for a frame or two, and the animation blueprint very, very, very, occasionally missed those frames. So rather than relying on the state of an enum in the C++ code, I belt-and-braced it, by checking for the correct set of Gameplay Tags.
The only way I could debug all this was to record the game with OBS, and step through the video, frame by frame, looking at the code state, the Gameplay Tags, and what the animation blueprint was doing. Yay.
I dunno how many times I’m going to learn the moral of this story, cos I was optimistic back in [[Week 52]]… but I am never EVER going to set up another character’s Animation Blueprint to talk to the C++ character class directly. Driving everything through Gameplay Tags is far easier to manage, and much more reliable. And yeah, I should really tear this whole thing apart, now I know what the character’s actually supposed to do…
The downside of doing things organically.
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