Entry 024 - Moveable Cells & Force-Field

Although a feature might seem easy to program, most of the time it's not. Movable Cells for instance, a simple idea of being able to move certain dedicated cubes. To make them feel new, I made a kind of teleportation system. But in order to get it to work, it took me days of pure frustration... well, for now it is done. There's still a little error, but it's not critical, hence screw it for now and continue working on other parts of the game.

But what are Movable Cells? How do they work? The Cells themselves will lie around all over the map. Once you get close to one it'll glow indicating, that it can be activated.

Foreground: Usable Movable Cell / Background: Force-Field.

Now that it's been marked as active, you can interact with certain platforms on the ground. If triggered using a key, the lastly activated Movable Cell will be teleported to the platform. But there's a little catch: once a Cell has been activated, no other one can be used until the original one has been deactivated.

An activated Movable Cell; on top of a platform.

Other than that, I've done a lot of thinking, mostly about the story and the environment. Especially the last one became boring to look at... don't get me wrong, it worked well but I came up with something different. A sky-box. But a fake one, that is merely some kind of a projection onto the sphere. If you get to close to the sphere, a force-field will appear to show off the levels boundaries.

Greetings,
Dave

Entry 023 - Energy Cells gone?

Well, it (again) has been way too much time since the last post and I dearly apologize for that. Let me start with the Energy Cell System: I continued working on it and had a version with a carriable cell that was even throwable AND, if thrown on a cell station, went right in there. It was gorgeous to look at but once I tried implementing more than one cell it all just broke. No matter which cell you grabbed, only the first one to be placed in the map was grabbed. I broke it down the easiest way possible to get rid of the problem, but after almost two weeks of pure despair I gave up... guess that was the point where my programming knowledge ended (since I am designer, not to forget).

Edit: Not to forget, I worked with cells to trigger from a distance. It was alright and functional but... it just didn't feel right hence another two weeks gone. Not wasted, though, since I learned a lot about tracing within the UE4.

The Switch Cell (off/on) and the Movable Cell.

So what to do? For now, all three skills will be accessible using dedicated keys. Once I figure out a way to implement a HUD working great with VR a queue skill-set might be implemented (more on that later... eventually). Other than that I made the textures for switches and a moveable cell working with pressure plates. Besides that some optimizations were made; for instance a better and more flexible checkpoint-system or an enhanced lighting setup etc. Also finally I do have an idea for a great ending of the game, story-wise of course.

After all you can see I was definitely busy even though I was sick with the flu for two weeks. The next things to consider for the project are: getting to a feature finish being close ahead and figuring out the financial part. One consideration might be switching to Patreon or even making a crowdfunding campaign... but only once the features are mostly done and I have started the level design. That's it for now, take care!

Greetings,
Dave