Archive:

"Many Many Fixes"

Posted: 26 August, 2022

Monday 22.08.2022

I ended last week having given the build the first proper test it’d had in a while. There were a fair things to fix and tweak, most of which I managed to get through today:

• Rats weren’t pausing when the campfire started. This is fixed for all overworld NPCs
• Made the path to the wand more obvious in SUL.
• Moved the solitary light in the Lumo dungeon to highlight the door the player needs to find!
• Made all images in the journal the same size, which stops things bouncing up and down as you scroll
• Cairn energy bars were reappearing during their destruction sequence
• Cairns were leaving VFX and Audio behind when they died
• Added missing quads around the East Ley env
• Collision on Mud Piles was too small to block the player from hitting one of the cairns
• Player didn’t respawn from the EL dungeon in the correct place
• Hearg-y Hearg-y Ho wasn’t completed when the dungeon was unlocked
• Bella’s respawn point was too far away from her door
• All audio in level sequences now has a sound class and attenuation class set, even if they’re raw assets and not sound cues
• Calculated movement speed for the player during cutscenes was too high, resulting in some anims playing far too quickly.
• Wand was blocked from firing projectiles if you swapped to another inventory item and back
• Increased the size of the LSV around SUL and added rocks to slow the player’s entry into the map. It should help with the blending as you move out of Ytene. (Guess who didn’t make a big enough dog leg...)
• Collecting the Net also gave the player the Bow
• Fire Pit chest on the edge of Ytene was checking for the wrong global event, meaning it could never be unlocked.

Tuesday 23.08.2022

More bugs and little tweaks, today. The biggest item was getting the bow to fire three arrows [when powered-up] while the player was Z-Targeting. After digging into it, it was actually firing three, but the two on the sides were colliding with the central one and failing to spawn. A bit of rotating and offsetting later...

I also added a new NPC for the armoury. She’s still placeholder atm, but her intro dialog is in. The rest:

• Increased the percentages of the loot drops in holes around East Ley
• Time update is frozen when book pages are being displayed
• Mud Piles break into pieces, like pots
• The outdoor chests in Henge End are one-time only now
• Made a wicker basket for Derek
• Shovel and Net both display a helper dialog, explaining how to get to the inventory wheel
• Laura Cruz checks if she’s out of the frustrum and deletes herself once her dialog is completed.

Wednesday 24.08.2022

The problem with my “do no up-front design” methodology is that, when you do fuck-up, it can be a bit painful to fix.

I’ve been carrying a couple of cock-ups for the duration of the project. The most egregious is that the player’s house is in the wrong place. In fact, Henge End, in its entirety, could do with being flipped on the horizontal...which ain’t gonna happen.

Because of this, I mapped out East Ley hoping the player would enter from the right-hand side, but it’s obvious, now that I’m playing the build again, that they’ll enter from Stone Henge [on the left]. Which is fine. Stone Henge is supposed to be the hub area.

But... everything in East Ley – the NPCs that explain things, the power ups, the campfires, and the sign-posts – is back to front. It makes the level confusing.

Today I bit the bullet and flipped it all.

I also added some placeholder dungeons, for each map, with a big “Complete Me” button, and made sure the player could get in and out of them.

Friday 26.08.2022

Following on from the changes to East Ley; I’ve decided that I want the player to warp back into the hub area when they complete a Dungeon. Now that I’m able to walk into them all, hit the “Complete Me” button, and exit, it’s obvious that the trek out of each overworld location isn’t going to be much fun.

I’m not going to make massive changes just because the dungeon’s completed. The player’s done their thing. Better for everyone if I just whisk them back to the centre so they can get on with the next thing.

Remodelled Stone Henge to support this, added respawn points, new sign posts, new paths, and ran around timing things. I think it’s feeling better.

Also discovered a couple of useful things:

1. It’s possible to override the game mode’s StartPlay function to change the order of BeginPlay dispatching. I’ve constantly run into the problem where Actors try to check against GameState that’s not been loaded, but now I can use StartPlay to load the state before any actors fire up. Utter god send!

2. I’ve discussed my DoF woes before; when I went back to standard (unconstrained aspect ratio) settings for my game cameras, I lost the stupidly short DoF I’d created by adjusting filmback settings. Well, I was able to fix it by letting the camera go to a zero f-stop and setting a teeny tiny aperture size. The results look exactly like my filthy hack but should support ultra-wide monitors!