Week 20 - Off the Map week 2

This week was another week spent really getting to grips with engine jargon, I feel like I am getting there with the blueprints and have put some basic stuff together using online tutorials etc. I have managed to get a simple camera swap working, whilst we dropped the idea quite fast I managed to get it to change to first person and back to sidescroller. We dropped the idea early on as we felt it was a cool concept but would be difficult to execute and to justify. Instead we opted for switching the camera at a specific point and only swapping back at the end of the game. This would be done via cutscene.

At this point a lot of our team had decided what they really wanted to get out of this project, for some bizarre reason our team contains three character artists so we need three characters. I wanted to do Alice for certain; we needed a rabbit and decided to use the caterpillar towards the end. Although we aren’t so certain on how the end is going to pan out at the moment, the plan is to start at the canal, you see the rabbit follow it to the rabbit hole. Fall down said rabbit hole and enter a cave sequence followed by a size shrinking puzzle. This is then followed by a forrest level, which features lots of platforming puzzles ( timing based etc.)

Something else I tried to figure out this week was the implementation of a checkpoint system. You think that this would be a standard thing in unreal engine as its in almost every game. At least it will be a simple blueprint right? WRONG its possibly the most complicated thing ever. Such a lengthy process fo such little reward is almost insulting, even when I got it working; sort of. It wouldn’t work properly as the blueprint I used as reference was out of date. I started thinking about ways around this, would it be easier to approach it a different way? In the end I decided to create each respawn individually, as there is only a handful. To do I created a killvolume that when entered it teleports you back to a designated point in the level.