Hello! This is a continuation from the last blog form which I have made a lot of progress on various features of the game which I will talk through in the next few blogs.
Next, we come onto the buffs and debuffs system. This comprises of one base class for attaching the effect to the actor and destroying it, and then 3 more base classes with one for a buff, one for a debuff and one for the effect. Childern blueprint classes are then made from these to create the buffs an debuffs. This ensures that all the shared attributes are not needed to be duplicated every time a new buff or debuff is made as well as being able to change the effects easily. It also ensures that new buffs and debuffs can be added effortlessly.
Speed Buff
Immolation Debuff
Currently, there is only one buff and one debuff. These two won't neccessarily be available in the final build of the game. However, they still prove useful to show that the system works as intended with displaying a buff or debuff to the screen at the top right. With better images, they will be more visible. The current images are temporary for the sake of testing that they are shown as intended.
The speed buff increases the max walking speed to 700. This used to reset every time the player crouched or proned which would reset the speed back to crouch, prone or normal walking speed. To fix this, a simple boolean was added which was set to true when the speed buff was active and was set to false once it had run out. This meant that it worked as intended even when using movement that would normally change movement speed. The movement speed now only changes if the speed buff is false. However, the movement speed while crouched and prone is obviously far too fast so this will be adjusted in the future if the buff stays for the final game.
Speed Buff Fix
Zoom/Binoculars
The next thing I have added is the feature to zoom in and out. This will allow the player to spot enemies from a distance on a bigger sized level. There is also an animation that accompanies this feature which works very well. I would like to add binoculars to the player's hand in the future to make it even better and simply make the equipped gun's mesh invisible and make the binoculars visible until the animation is finished. It works by simply decreasing the field of view when the player zooms in and increasing it back to default when the player zooms out. This is done using two separate timelines and lerps to ensure the smooth zooming in and out effect. Along with this, the binocular widget appears on the screen to give the illusion of looking through binoculars.
Pause Menu
The next addition is the pause menu. While in game, P or Escape can be pressed to bring up the pause menu. This gives the options to resume game (or just press P or Escape again), save the game, options menu, and quit. Quit will give the option to quit to the main menu or to desktop. If save is pressed, the game is saved and will reload this save whenever the game is resumed from the main menu. There is currently no autosave. The options button brings up the options menu from which the player can change graphics settings and the master volume for the game. There will also be a sensitivity slider added here in the future. Currently, the default background just shows a screen shot from an earlier build of the game which will be changed in the future.
Options Menu
As you can see from the GIF below, once save game has been pressed, the position of the player and collectibles are saved and loaded once play is pressed again. Although not directly seen from the GIF, the player's health, ammo, level, game time, experience and experience needed are all saved and loaded. Currently the only way to delete save data is by pressing zero '0' but this will be changed so that the player can access and delete their saved data in game through the menus.
Saving and Loading
Doors
The player can also now interact with doors by getting in range and pressing F to open and F again to close. The animati0n is done through a timeline.
As can be seen through every GIF and image from the last 3 blogs, there has also been the introduction of a mini map which shows an aerial view of the map and can help with navigation. This is done by using another camera boom placed on the player character and adding a 'SceneCaptureComponent2D' which shows an orthographic projection of the map. This is then placed on a widget and displayed to the player.
This concludes the posts on the current progress that has been made and now you are all caught up! The next blog will hopefully be about the inventory system which should be finished soon. If not, then there are other things to look forward to such as advancements in the weapons system and more.
Thanks for reading and I hope to see you in the next blog which will release soon!
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