Personal Development Project - Blog Entry 1

For this personal development project, I want to expand on a set of basic mechanics I produced earlier, as I see potential in them for this project, these were a simple set of moment mechanics which I will alter and expand on within this project.

The basic concept for my game is mirrors edge meets super hot, a free-running action game.

To begin production I knew I wanted to list a few key mechanic I wanted to include in conjunction with what I already had:

- different speeds for crouching, running and moving at regular pace. (needs bug fixing)

- sliding mechanic.

- rope swing mechanic.

- wall running.

- wall climbing. (needs expanding on)

- shooting system.

- slow motion mechanic.

- crouching system. (needs bug fixing)

The Rope Swing

An image of the visual scripting i did to produce the rope swing

The rope swing was quite difficult to produce as I made it when my visual scripting skills were still in early development, however I got it to work by creating a rope that attaches to specific set points in the world when the player enters the desired set radius.

The function that gets called to - this allows the player to throw the rope and swing

The player then rotates with a force applied around the desired point, then when they press the space bar (as seen in image 1) the animation of the rope attaching to the point plays backwards via a timeline.

in order to add to the complexity of the mechanic I also decided that it would add to the tension if the rope snapped after 4 seconds after you rope swing.

The Walking Speeds

The visual scripting of my initial walk speed settings

I created the walk speeds by initially creating some float values that would directly effect the characters movement speed when pressed and released. I additionally created a custom event for sprinting in case i needed to reference it anywhere in the future.

The Crouching Mechanic

I created the crouching mechanic that checks on a Boolean if the character is crouched, if that is true then it runs a check to see if there is anything above it, if that is true, then it won't allow the player to stand, however it will allow the player to stand if nothing is above it. The crouch then lowers the players height via a float amount and it also changes the player speed to the max crouch speed. Finally, it checks if the player has jumped. if that is true, it resets the player speed back to stand speed and player height back to stand height.

With the crouch mechanic implemented i further expanded on how it inter-plays with the other speed states. I created a branch and sequence from the player that makes it so that if the player sprints the character height turns to stand height and speed turns to sprint speed. The problem with this is that the player can sprint under objects and get stuck. This is one of the bugs I intend to fix at a later date that was part of the original set of mechanics.

The Wall Climb

Visual scripting of wall climb.

The wall climb works by creating a line trace by channel, the channel is a tag on actors via an event tick, so when the line trace comes into contact with an actor with the tag and the player holds the space bar, so long as the player has the space bar held down, the character will get launched on the Z axis (up) but a value of 500. effectively creating the illusion of climbing up the wall.