Week 20 Research & Development Deprartment

This week I thought I would write about some of the potential game mechanics I've been working on

The rest of the group are all helping visualise our ideas, that area is not my strong suit, and no one else really understands or really wants to understand the blueprint system in Unreal Engine.

So I suppose you could say I am a one man R&D department at the moment.

One idea I have been toying with is portal doors, I feel they would fit well within the Alice in wonderland theme as in the book she does walk through a few doors into worlds that shouldn't really exist beyond them.

The actual teleportation of the player is quite easy to accomplish. There is in fact a teleportation node in the blueprint. All that only input that is required is the absolute world position of the destination.

The visual effects of the portal will be a little more challenging, ideally I would like to achieve something like the effect in the game Datura

http://cdn.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Datura_doorway.jpg

Also seen in Monsters Inc., I think it’s fascinating seeing a whole other world from only one side of a doorway unsupported by surrounding walls.

I have started trying to fake this using a 2D scene capture actor, the same thing I used to create the TV effect. While there are so many great things about using UE4, one thing I am slightly annoyed about is that the perfect feature for what I want to achieve existed in Unreal engine 3. There was an actual portal actor that worked in the same way as the doors do in monsters Inc., without even faking it. Unfortunately they have not added this feature back into UE4, so I am left to my own devices.

I have seen one person successfully recreate it, but they went beyond blueprints and used C++, something I will not be able to pick up during this project. Just being realist here, I would love to learn it one day but I do not think I could learn it in time to be useful in this project.