Slimegeon Possession

Jamari Williams - 2/16/2023

I am responsible for the base Slime character and its movement, and the possession of enemies. Since my fellow developer, Will Fox finished making the basic Ghoul enemy, I started working on getting its possession working. 

I started by making a base class for all possessable characters to derive from. It inherits from the Pawn class in Unreal Engine but also has a HealthBar component that I wrote and a VisualText for debugging purposes. There are also functions for each child to override when the player possesses them. I tried to create this base class in C++ but was struggling to make virtual functions that could be implemented in Blueprint. I’ll have to look into that in the coming days. 

I then made the base Slime character and the Ghoul derived from this class and started implementing the animations to respond to the player’s input. I made a separate conduit for when the player is possessing versus when the AI is taking control. It is not in a functioning state right now. Once the player possesses the enemy, it just loops whatever animation was playing before it was possessed. I didn’t quite get the attack to respond to the player movement either as I didn’t have the time to finish today. 

This week, I ran into multiple issues and the feature still needs to be finished. I am hesitating to move forward because my team members suggested another way to build the system in a more modular way, saving work and effort in the long run. Looking back, I duplicated a lot of code in the animation blueprint for the ghoul, in the future I will rework this. I may discard this method entirely and rebuild each enemy to have its own player controller so that I don’t need to override every Attack function.