Blueprints: Mechanics

One of the most important part 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.

The next hurdle was to create a dynamic camera that could interact with certain scenes for a more cinematic feel to the game. Juxtaposed to the last blueprint, this was rather difficult to set-up correctly as I had to set-up my own trace channel which I wanted to originally use for character mechanics only.

This was an issue due to the fact that UE4 only allows us to use a maximum of 18 additional trace channels. Oh! And trace channels allow the player to constantly trace for a certain object on command whatever distance in relative position to it… a powerful function to have!

Nonetheless I pursued forward with this blueprint. One of the first issues to arise was the camera itself. At first I wanted to allow the player to have his camera boom rotate around him when in contact with certain areas of the map, this proved rather difficult as setting up a second camera inside a character blueprint was something I had not done. However I was willing to learn.

After a week of failed attempts I soon realised that the camera boom was to be deleted and replaced with another boom that allowed the follow camera to be referenced correctly. This then allowed me to reference and update the camera on command, allowing us to pan, tilt and zoom.

This too was set-up with a trace channel and later a timeline function to make the transition smoother.

Nevertheless, this then messed up the character control as it was now moving in an odd way. Something I’m still working on to fix.

The secondary camera was set up to help create a cinematic angle of the room, this was done in the level blueprint however I did run into a lot issues with this. The main issue was the character movement playing up due to the mouse being able to move the position of the player.

Unfortunately I had to cut this blueprint out due to the fact that it made the game unbearably annoying to play…. And it angered me!

Moving on! I decided to focus on characters special movements, therefore working on how both the characters interact with the environment, i.e. the fire character burning up certain walls.

This was achieved by getting the actors rotation and relative location, breaking it and extracting certain values that I look for, for example tracing for plug holes on the ground. From here I would trace for any hit values and if the condition was true it would move the character to where I needed it to be.

However this would have a variety of outcomes because it breaks the X, Y and Z values (Roll, Pitch, and Yaw) and multiplying it and then adding it to the original location, this little piece of code or math makes it a trial and error process.

From here both James Broderick and I decided to fuse our documents together create a super blueprint… sort off!