Hazrat
One of the most important parts of the FMP is to get down the base mechanics such as character movement and interaction to portray an engaging and fun experience.
This is usually the part that most people cower away from…. The somewhat messy and chaotic ENGINE WORK!!!!!
But fear not! For I find them somewhat entertaining and fun… if they work that is!
Oh just to get a sense of what I am doing, I usually carry a little black book around with me, in which I scribble my deepest darkest secrets on blueprinting! So I will share some scans on how I tackle them
So when it comes to mechanics I decided to first look out how we can switch between two different characters on screen. This was one of the main selling points of the game, the dynamic and dichotomous duo!
This was actually a rather simple blueprint to my surprise, It was all done in the level blueprint using a possess function and get player controller.
This allowed me switch character on instance when a certain key was hit. Nonetheless this was not as swift as I wanted to be. I wanted it to be more like the Lego games with a dynamic pan and some orb like lights switching between characters... something to achieve in the future!!
Due to the nature of this blueprint I did have to set on game start function that lets you start as one player, instead of the other. This makes the blueprint run smoothly.
James:
At the start of the project we brainstormed a list of things our characters could and couldn’t do, coming up with the strengths and weaknesses of each character and looking into possible avenues we could go down eventually if we wanted more complex gameplay.
My first job was to test out Haz’s character switching mechanics using the two different characters, adjusting things to make sure the fire and water character have their own unique feel. For example: the water guy can’t jump and falls very quickly almost like a raindrop down a window whereas the fire guy is a bit more floaty and controlled with his movement. Just the smallest of changes already creates an interesting dynamic and creates a reason to switch characters.
With the characters now having their own different feel the switching mechanic felt good, however some work needed to be done to make it reusable for the game. I decided to rework the character possession script Haz made into a game mode blueprint, this allows us to reuse the script on different levels if necessary plus add in some other logic for things like respawning characters in from a player start rather than from being placed in the level.
Another thing I added here which taken a little bit of problem solving to get right was an AI system where the other character would follow the one controlled by the player, this was nice for bringing the characters to life but occasionally the other character would get in the way, so I added in volumes that disable the AI following in areas where it isn’t needed.
I needed something as well to test the respawn mechanic so I created a simple rain cloud blueprint that could kill the fire character, allowing him to respawn. This was more trouble than I thought as switching the character during the respawn would break the game, which is nice. So I needed to create a graph that stops switching the character if there isn’t anything to switch to!
