Archive:
Orangery is done!
(Sans audio)
I was debating how to do this; I could use a Level Sequence to control a series of spawners, but I decided to use the Foxy Twiddlers and Foxy Switches that I made back in [[Week 50]].
There’s a Twiddler Chain, for each tile on the floor, that spawns a target (Niagara particle effect) and then, a couple of seconds later, an Orange. The Orange falls under gravity, hits the ground, and spawns a particle effect to cover up the tile disappearing. Above that, there’s another Twiddler Chain that the Room Controller twiddles when the player enters the room, which kicks the whole thing off.
I had to extend the Twiddler Chain C++ class to allow me to randomise the chain, but other than that, it was dead simple to get going. I think I’ll also need to add a method to stop the Twiddler Chain from twiddling when the player exits the room.
In my original design layout for Willy’s Mansion, I had two hidden exits out of The Attic, one leading to The Battlements, and one to The Roof. Thinking about it, one of these would always be accessible to the player before they’d unlocked the camera, meaning there’d be five possible routes back to the Hub. This feels a little convoluted. I want as many rooms as possible to have hidden exits, but not until the player’s got all their abilities, and has had time to get comfy with the idea that things are hidden in the stuff they didn’t see “the first time”.
So I’ve remodelled The Attic, removed one of the hidden exits, and put the other on the south wall, meaning they’ll need to be able to rotate the room to see it / access it.
I’m going to have a minor puzzle in here, using a push block, and a new type of Wand Interactive that I thought of the other day: imagine a 1m x 1m cube. When it’s invisible, it has no collision. When it’s visible, it slowly brings its collision in, from bottom to top, lifting any object that’s resting over it. The player will need to move a Push Block to sit over one of these new Wand Interactives, lifting it up to gain access to the window in the ceiling. 
Under The Attic’s been a placeholder room, until now, and I was struggling to think of something cool to do with it. Then it dawned on me, I could do another face-on section – like Impossible Mission, in Moonbas – and make a little Prince of Persia type thing. So I started blocking that out.
Had to make a video for the publisher, who’s off to Gamescom soon, and found a CRACKING bug: VInterpTo – a built-in vector lerp, with a nice smooth curve – isn’t FPS independent. The player character in Space Toms uses this to add a bit of spring to its movement, but, at 144fps, it was moving less than half the speed it should. Took me ages to work out why, but the fix was easy enough. Remove the VInterp. Shame, it’s a lovely smoothment tool, that I’ve been using in a few places.
Finished blocking out Under The Attic, converted the brushes to a static mesh, cleaned-up the mesh and removed all the unneeded verts, textured it, and added enemies and torches. Tomorrow: buttons, gates, collapsible tiles, and pick-ups.
Made the spikes, push buttons and gates, laid everything out, and hooked everything up. There are wand activated walls leading to hidden areas, some rats running around, and a few bats on patrol. It’s a short little thing, but serves the purpose of getting the player back to The Hall (so they can exit out of The Backdoor), hopefully with a smile...
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