Dungeons & Reverse Pathing

I’d decided to begin working on the level building blocks, as these are going to be one of the essential pieces to offer the level designers when building levels, soas to give them the option for use of a grid-based level builder. The dungeon pieces (this is what I will be calling the level building blocks from here on) are created by making a child blueprint off of the BP_Spline object the player follows. This allows easy use of assigning the player to a “first block” to start at. While the implementation is not perfect and does not currently automatically detect which block is next to it, the current progress on the implementation is very functional. Along with this, I’m learning more about Morgan’s movement bound to the spline, especially in an environment where the player is practically switching spline objects every second or so.

One of the things I’ve learned was that I wanted the player to be able to swap directions in the path within the dungeon spaces. However, if a designer wanted to prevent the player from going backwards, they can just remove the assignment of the “Last Spline” within that block’s instance-editable variables. If the designer wanted to prevent the player from turning around altogether, I can build some settings for that.

When it comes to turning the player around and traveling back to the previous room, it wasn’t very difficult, but it sure was a layered issue. Once I’d gotten the player to turn around, getting the player to move backwards was easy, but ensuring the player could transition to the previous spline was a different case, as well as the players X Offset basically inversing every time they transitioned to a different dungeon piece. I’ve been able to resolve these issues, but now the current issue that lies is when the player is zipping to an object in a different block than they are currently in.

When the palyer leaves the spline’s influence to zip, the player moves and rotates freely. However, the way they are taken back into the spline’s influence is by reattaching to their currently assigned spline. When the player finishes the zip attack while outside of range of their currently assigned spline, the player gets yanked backwards. I may have to create a volume for the player to detect which spline they should assign themselves to when entering a room in order to alleviate this issue.

Otherwise, development is going way more than swimmingly of current. I will continue the implementation of the dungeon pieces, as well as playing with unique object types for the player to interact with. Future features I would like to have implemented soon are the free-roam movement and procedurally-generated dungeons.

EDIT: I noticed that Morgan’s left leg is kinda stretching. This may have been a result of my playing with the character’s animation blueprint. I should probably roll back on that, as the changes I made was pertaining to layered blending animations, something of which will not be needed for this project.