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Game Jam #3 - Feathers & Shadows (PART 2) - Assets

 

 

Unicorn model by Katie Eckton

This week's progress was light on the programming side but heavy in the art department. The other programmer successfully created some simple enemy AI that scanned for the player in a 'visible' radius and, when seen, would move towards them. The player would need to outflank the AI or leave the defined area in which the AI could move (to avoid it falling off the edge). As this was not my work I won't be detailing it here, instead you can find that in the programmer's own logs/diary.

My focus this week, after getting the project back, was on importing the 3D assets created by the 2 artists. In theory, this sounds like a simple task, akin to opening a document sent via email...

...it was not.

Objects & Materials

In 3DS Max (the 3D modelling software we use), you can, of course, create a single 'model' from a bunch of smaller objects & shapes. However, when you export this model, none of the objects will be 'linked' unless you do so intentionally. And Unreal will treat every unlinked object inside an fbx file like a separate model, importing them individually like puzzle pieces rather than as one complete object. This led to the feather model, for instance, being broken up into 12 separate stands of feather and a bare stalk.

In order to fix this, I had to open the model files in 3DS max and link them all. But that presented another problem: Once all one object, Unreal only applied a singular material (texture) to the entire object. Now, the games cartoony style meant that there was no need for complex textures but objects did still need to be more than one colour. And so, to fix that I had to unlink all the pieces and apply a material using the material editor in 3DS max to each section I wanted a different colour before re-linking them, re-exporting and re-importing into Unreal.

And then Unreal botched all the colours. It would understand each section (e.g. the grass and rock parts of an island) as a different material and allow you to manually apply individual colours but would not use the ones defined in 3DS max and instead just make them all white. So I had to recolour each model again inside Unreal.

Scaling

Once all the models were imported correctly and ready to use, I then noticed another annoying problem. See, in 3DS max, the scale of a model is local, meaning relative only to itself. When you import assets into unreal and add them to a scene, the local scale is translated to a global scale, meaning relative to the world space and its objects.

We didn't calibrate this correctly and so when I dragged the models into the world to be used, they were microscopic in size. In fact, a fun little mistake I made, is that they were so small that I actually forgot about two miniature pillars I had dragged in, and they still exist in the playable game today - with miniature hitboxes. Can you find them?

Collectibles

The small bit of programming I did this week was on implementing the collectible feathers. This was rather simple:

Main event graph

Each feather constantly checks for if anything other than the enemy is colliding with them and, if true, destroys the actor, plays a  sound effect and incriments an integer value in the GameMode blueprint which keeps a track of the number collected. Originally the branch condition was 'if colliding object is BP_PlayerBase (the player)' but that was problematic because when building the game, the name of the player seemed to change and so it would no longer work. Checking the collision was still necessary because without it the enemies could collect feathers for you, so my solution was to allow all colliding objects except the enemy, and since only the player and enemy can produce hit events, it meant only the player could collect the feathers.

Rotation & Float Control

Finally, I added some hard-coded animations so that they looked more appealing and better showcased that they were intractable in some way I achieved this first by always rotating them and then used a custom event called Float Control to make them move up and down within a range of vertical units.

Float Control works by checking a float called "Updown" which is incremented or decremented by the functions (but built as events here since I did not understand how Unreal handled functions at the time) that actually move the feather up or down. Depending on the value of this variable, Float Control will flip a boolean, acting as a switch, that decides whether to call the Float Down or Float Up functions.

Float Animation

These functions work by getting the Actor's current z-axis position, adding or subtracting a constant value (stored in 'Updown Curve') and then setting the result as the new position. Calling one of these each frame results in flowing movement. Both functions then make the same addition or subtraction to the 'Updown' control variable.

Result

 And with all that done, this is what the game looked like:

And that's the end of this log. But I'm not done yet! There's still more development to log, so stay tuned.

- JDM

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