Week 23: Like a Butterfly!

Little Problems and Weekly Changes

First of all let me say this: Our level is making an amazing progress!

I ended my last post by saying that I would aim to get the tea party puzzle finished by this week, however I quickly discovered this Monday, that this would not be the case. First of all I encountered a problem: Previously in older versions of the engine you were able to select a group of meshes in the level and convert them all into a single blueprint. I was going to use this to make a blueprint for the tea party table, which I could then play around with to take out some parts and enable the player to find them. However, as of 4.7 this feature has been replaced with something different, so I ultimately wasn't able to do what I planned to do.

I also thought once again about the puzzle in general and wasn't too keen on it anymore, so as a group we will have to think of puzzles a bit more. While we do have a few nice puzzles in the level, as it stands it just seems like we're still lacking gameplay. This will be an important part, as we won't just be judged on how nice the level looks, but also on how much interactivity there is. I hope we get around to this problem soon and find some nice gameplay elements that we could implement.

Additions: The Butterfly!

I did manage to work on something awesome this week though: A butterfly! I already started working on it a bit earlier, however this week I focused on completing it and now I have a fully working butterfly with very basic AI. I am using blueprints in this case to simulate AI, rather than using actual Unreal Engine AI systems. The whole idea is inspired by a butterfly that I found within the blueprints example of UE4. I made the whole thing from scratch however and also included a little addition. I wanted the butterfly to keep a distance from the player, as it would feel more realistic (anyone who tried to catch a butterfly before knows how hard it is to get close enough to a butterfly**) Everything works like a charm. The butterfly finds a random target to fly towards every few seconds and if something is within his range then it will land on it for a few seconds. If you get close to the butterfly it will quickly fly up high into the air and out of the player's reach. The model itself for the butterfly was made by Mark and it looks absolutely stunning!

Next up I am also planning on implementing a bird, which will work the same way. However, for that I would need a fully rigged bird with animations, as it would look weird if I have the wings of the bird flap in the same way as I have for the butterfly.

Additions Part 2: Collectibles

Finally, I have sat down and created a quick blueprint for collectibles. It's a fully dynamic blueprint, in which you can choose a static mesh and it will make it look and work like a collectible. I made the mesh glow slightly and added some sparkling particle effects around it. The object is then rotating slowly and bopping up and down slightly in the air. Looks quite awesome!

Plans for next week:

For the upcoming week I am looking into further thinking about puzzles and trying to implement some more things into our level. I will also probably look back at the maze that we have in our level as we are currently working on changing quite a bit of it. Also if I will find some time I want to try and do some more arty stuff. After all, I am studying Game Art Design :)

Stay tuned~

**- And yes, I have actually tried to catch a butterfly..(during a volunteering session I did as part of my job at McDonald's) and I succeeded: