Possession, Lock-On Blips, and Yeti

Jamari Williams - May 19th, 2023

This week, I replaced the temporary possession and lock on blips, made teleporting work in the tutorial, and imported a mesh with animations for our final boss: the Yeti. 

I started, by replacing the possession blip. I created a new post-process material that outlines actors at the level. This is the tutorial I followed: https://youtu.be/-gfZrTMeKMo. I made it match the same color as the default slime. In the tutorial, this material is on all of the time, but I only want it to be shown when an enemy is ready to be possessed. To do this, I check and uncheck the Render CustomDepth Pass bool on the meshes. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/BlueprintAPI/Rendering/SetRenderCustomDepth/. Only meshes with this marked as true will have outlines. 

For the lock-on, it was much simpler. I just created a UI widget on the PossessBase that turns red when the player locks on. I made an animation that lerps between two colors so it looks smooth. I did have an issue where the image wasn’t showing up, but I figured out that it was because the anchor of the image wasn’t in the center. Since the widget is in world space, I didn’t think anchors were applied. 

I moved on to adding a mesh for the yeti and replaced the gray cube that was our final boss. I was given an asset by my producer through Full Sail that came with animations. 

Aside from just placing him in the level, I had to make a few changes. I used a gray cube because I thought our Yeti asset was going to be bulkier and the player would launch to his head. The yeti would then grab them off of his head and throw them down the mountain. This asset is tall and skinny, meaning the player would have to be launched very high to make it to his head, which I felt would have been a little jarring. Instead, I moved the weak point to be on his knee. I was lucky that the Yeti had a rising slash animation, so I used that to throw the player back down the mountain. The weak point also moves locations as the fight goes on. Next week, I will make it so that the third time the player attacks the Yeti, he’s on his knees and the weak point is on his head. I added in hit, throw, and death animations and we now have a better final boss. 

Next week, I will add more sound and visual effects to give more player feedback and do more bug fixing.