Archive:
I have one thing left to do on the character controller: a little montage to indicate that you can’t jump because there’s something above you. So I’m calling it. This is officially the longest time I’ve ever spent writing a custom character. But it was fun, and I’m pleased with it.
I grabbed an audio pack full of bleeps and bloops, and made Gilby play some of them randomly when you turn, or rotate around the level mesh. It’s kinda subtle, but it’s like they’re talking to themselves, which has been cracking me up all week. I’ve also tidied up the animations, improved the blends, and added some additional poses. Everything's a lot smoother, and feels more alive.
I’ve also made a start on the follow camera, it’s still mostly tied to the character, but this project I’m using the PlayerCameraManager class, something I didn’t even know existed until a few months ago. This saved me moving over a bit of the usual boilerplate and it’s made it super simple to spawn camera shakes, and blend between multiple cameras, or states. I guess that why it exists. (I have no idea how that flew under the radar...)
The biggest job, this week, was the pickup items. I made a plugin for these while working on 2umo, so I moved that over and refined it. I now have, essentially, two types: a basic pickup, for simple blueprints, that handles being collected by an actor, but lets the BP decide what to do, and another that applies an attribute, or a gameplay tag, onto the PlayerState or the GameState. I had another variant in 2umo, that handled giving items to the player, but it dawned on me that I can do this by passing a gameplay tag, so I was able to bin that. Variation’s provided by passing DataAssets into the pickup, when placing them in the editor. Super simple, works great, and it’s the same pattern that I used for all the interactives in 2umo. Having one thing – data driven – that swaps its mesh, audio, VFX and behaviour, was a big improvement, and removed a lot of potential bug vectors.
I’m obviously a fan of fruit in video games, so my first batch of pick-ups are the classics: cherries, apples, pineapples, aubergines, chilli peppers and pears.
If you’re wondering why everything is so shiny; I’ve moved this project over to the new Substrate material system. It’s a massive change, which I’m still getting my head around, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun clear-coating, and adding glitter.
I think I’ve stumbled on the look for at least one of the biomes!
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Source Code:
I'm slowly open sourcing as much of my code as possible. It's not generic — it was all written for a specific use-case, for specific games — but it could be useful, and it might spark a few ideas:
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