Buttons, and more buttons.

Still working on the container city project and things are progressing well.

You could say that the main objective in our level is just to progress, to get to the lift at the end, and we have added interest in the actual journey to that lift.

So to make that journey a little more interesting we have added some small obstacles or puzzles for the player to find a way around. The first of which that is encountered will be a wire hanging down into a puddle, creating sparks and a dangerous area the player cannot cross initially.

This mechanic has been used so many times in games it is a well-established trope, the players sees the electrified water, and has to find a secondary route or turn off the electricity to pass. Yet however many times I have encountered this mechanic in games I never seem to get tired of it, this is why I’m perfectly happy trying to implement it in our level.

While max is working on the particle effects that will show the player the puddle is electrified and give a clear sense of danger, and have been working on the “back-end” of the this little puzzle.

The essential purpose of the electrified puddle is just to block the player, it could just be a basic door, but having just a door blocking the pass would be a bit boring. In actual games this scenario would block the player’s path by killing them if they tried to progress, but our small level is lacking some key aspects that make that system viable.

If the player were to die, a re-spawn system would have to be added, if the player were to receive damage and then die, it would have to be made known to the player that they are actually receiving damage. Full games have a HUD and sounds and even vibrations to feed back to the player what is actually happening, being realistic we just won’t be able to achieve that in the time given to us, and it’s not really even the area of game creation I want to be concentrating on at the moment.

The rather short workaround my long winded explanation of this problem, is simply to add a blocking volume around the puddle. At the end of the day the puddle’s most basic purpose is to block the player from progressing, so why make things more complicated than they need to be.

I also learned a bit about communicating between blueprints this week, as I needed the blueprint containing the switch to speak to the blocking volume when activated, and a whole number of other things. My switch blueprint is actually getting a little complicated now.

When pressed a whole number of things happen:

The switch is animated downwards

A sound is played

The blocking volume is destroyed

The sparks particle emitter is destroyed

A steam particle emitter is added

All this happens in no time at all, and will probably go un-noticed, but that is what is great about adding immersion, is that you shouldn't notice everything going on, but it would create a jarring experience if it wasn't there.