Archive:
Banged through a load of TODO items:
Also heard back from Chris Abbott (from C64 Audio) about the licensing. I thought it’d be cool to have an 80s boombox in a few of the rooms, as a secret collectible thing. You find them, and they play whatever I’m nudge-nudge-wink-winking at. A bit like MGS 5, only less Bowie. Chris seemed to think that getting the Ocean Loader would be a bit of a stretch, but offered me Ben Daglish’s entire back-catalogue. And that got me thinking…
I met Ben a couple of times, very early on in my career, and he was a lovely bloke. I spent most of the night in a pub car-park, smoking doobs, the first time, and that always left an impression on me. I ended up being good friends with a couple of people in his circle, but never got to catch-up with him again, and like everyone else, I was gutted when I heard that he’d passed.
Chris’ offer got me thinking. My little Boombox idea could replace the Cassette 50 pickups from the original game. Except this time, you’ll be collecting Ben’s music. Just needs a little Jukebox somewhere – like the spawn room! – and people can play stuff to their heart’s content. And Ben’s tracks might find the ears of some new people. That wouldn’t be a bad tribute.
Ugh, not a good day.
Rider updated and the build shat-the-bed. Something changed somewhere, but I decided not to dig too deeply, and instead, pulled the latest from the UE5 GitHub repo, and re-built everything. Or tried to. The clang-tidy plug-in I dropped into the build last week started barfing over missing pre-compiled headers in some of the engine tools, which took me a little while to spot. Instead of one build, I ended up doing two, and wasted an hour. Shakes fist at the sky
I got back up and running, but it deflated the mood somewhat.
Added a mock Stone Henge to The Chapel (where you collect the Wand). Since Maenhir refers to Lumo, I’m going to use 2umo to set Maenhir up, so that’s the first nod.
There’s a mural (cheers Ste!) in Maenhir’s first dungeon, hidden behind the faux Master Sword, that you’d only spot it if you purposefully went back there (so 99.99% of people will never see it), which is a shame, cos it gives away the twist. So, double bubble: I’ve dropped it into The Chapel as well. 99.99% of people won’t see it in there, either. Fitting.
I’d like to use Maenhir’s runes – a custom font Ste Pickford made for me – in a few places in this game, but I need to decide what they’ll say. There’s a character in Maenhir that’s left the hidden messages all over the world, and the wand in that game makes them visible. Well, it will do, none of them have been written yet... I could pre-empt it now, and hope everything lines up later, but… I’m a little worried that I’ll paint myself into a corner. Hmmm.
(Future Gareth: yeah, nah, the runes never made it in.)
Wand Interactives – like the 1m platforms that appear when the Wand is activated – have never checked to see if anything’s actually inside their collision when they appear. I always knew this would be a problem; there’s a risk that de-penetration will push the player character (or an NPC) out of the room, or ping them into space… So today I dug into it, and added a Box Overlap check. Any intersection from Pawns (Player or NPC) prevent the collision from being enabled. Much safer. They continue polling, and when there’s nothing inside of them, safely turn their collision on.
It’s a little weird for the player; they’ll have to walk out of them and then interact with them again, but it stops things accidentally being thrown into space.
Also added a way to fade the screen to black. I need this to cover up the transition between certain rooms. Lerping the camera looks horrible if it’s doing too much at once. Anyway, it’s a handy thing to have.
When I started rolling my own, simplified Gameplay Ability System , I created an Actor Component that “listens” for tags being added to the Player State. My Effect Listener. The Double Jump uses it to spawn particle effects under the player’s feet… Anyway, it was a good first pass, but it only responded to tags being added, not removed. So today I re-wrote it to handle both, and dug through the Player State to make sure it was broadcasting appropriately. Also added the ability to spawn Camera Shake Actors.
With that done, the jump cancel / float cancel spawns VFX and shakes the camera when the player hits the ground. And since it’s not obvious that you can cancel out of float/jump, I added an Action Button Icon to the player character, that appears on-screen while you’re floating.
I quite like having the HUD elements close to the player in screen space, so I’m going to see if I can do something similar with the Wand Charge button icon.
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