tiafernandes

In this week, I created lots more art so that I could try to create pop-up text boxes. At this point, I had talksprites for Irene, the Creator, Jay (all three characters) and silhouetted/'mystery' talksprites for Irene and the Creator. Now that all of their art was fully complete, I could also pick and choose what to use in the sell sheet I had started working on the week before.

It was at this point that I began to play around properly with blueprinting, but struggled as I couldn't figure out how to input different text for every text box. I had created a widget with a text box and an image inside it, and could call it when the player overlapped a sphere collision but couldn't figure out how to input the correct text, attach the correct image or get the box to go away once all text had been scrolled through. 

If I were to do this project again I would have started blueprinting the difficult content earlier than I did so that I would not struggle as much in the later weeks.

Week 5

After asking for assistance I finally had the text box up and working. This was a great reassurance and it felt like the end of the project was finally in sight after it was done!!!

Now that I could call functioning text boxes easily, I began to add items into the scene and allow the player to interact with them and find out more about them by walking up to them. Since a lot of my game was based around story, this was extremely helpful as I could now add the bulk of my gameplay. In this week, I also added looping music (music credit to hmix.net) 

However, towards the end of the week I noticed that the game was feeling a little lacking in that there weren't many ways to play that weren't just walking into items. After this I decided to add more interesting dialogue, special items and another mechanic such as trampolines, allowing for more complex platforming, and set about planning and creating sprites for these.

Week 6

In this week I added the trampolines to the game. After recreating the lower half of my level to be more complex, I modified the jump pad we had been taught to create in classes to that I could use it for a trampoline in my game. This proved difficult as I was constantly adjusting the numbers to try and get the amount of force correct so that Irene could still be directed in mid-air and wouldn't fly straight into objects above her. 

Another main point to my game was the change of sprites from Irene's 'silhouette' to her 'regular' sprites, indicating that she had found out something about herself. I tried changing the flipbook animation to no avail, but had scheduled a playtesting session with some of Group B and needed to have something functioning in this slot in order for my game to be effective. For my workaround, I essentially created an on-overlap event which would destroy the current (silhouette) pawn, spawn a new (regular) pawn and possess the new pawn. This led to a lot of bugs that were (eventually) straightened out, although you could still see the character 'hop' slightly when the new pawn was possessed. However, it functioned well enough to give an impression of the effect I wanted to achieve and so I was satisfied with using it just for the playtest and feedback session.

Week 3

In this week, I created more assets such as talksprites and started blocking out my level. However, as I worked on it I realised that the layout of the level was not interesting or fun to play, and decided to change it to be more vertical than horizontal. I thought this better fit the game theme of leaping into the unknown. I came up with another draft of the level design and spent some time putting it together in Unreal so that I could have the character run around and jump in order to test that everything worked and could be reached.