Bug Fixes and Cinematics

Jamari Williams - May 26th, 2023

This week, I worked on a few bugs, adjustments, and cinematics for all of the bosses. 

Starting with the bugs, at some point, the enemies stopped targeting the slime in the main level. Once the player possessed an enemy, they would behave normally, but they would ignore the Slime. I’m not sure what caused this bug, but I did find a solution after doing some research. Our enemies use Unreal’s AI Sight perception to detect when to aggro the player, so I figured they had stopped seeing the Slime. The AI perception only detects actors with an AI Stimulus Source with the appropriate stimulus checked. 

This ended up being the solution, just adding this component to the Slimeman. This issue was the most confusing because all Pawns in Unreal Engine have the sight stimulus checked by default and the Slime derives from Pawn. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ai-perception-sight-not-seeing-actor/420690 

I also fixed a bug with the Missile Turtle, where the missiles wouldn’t collide with terrain. To combat this issue earlier, I just put the missiles on a timer before they exploded and it wasn’t very noticeable, since the Missile Turtle is a rare encounter in the main level. I would have used our other projectiles as a reference, but every other projectile uses Unreal’s Projectile Movement component and I move the missiles manually through the event tick. 

I had to do a couple of things to fix this. First, the missiles were still using the DefaultSceneRoot, and collisions weren’t being detected. To fix this, I made the collision box the scene root. Next, I had to flip on the Sweep bool when I used SetActorLocation every tick. Sweep is what allows hit collisions to be detected by Unreal when changing an object’s location with this node. This issue has been in the game since the Missile Turtle’s introduction and I’m glad to have fixed it.  https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/BlueprintAPI/Utilities/Transformation/SetActorLocation/ 

My last big contribution was creating cinematic opening cutscenes for all three bosses. I used Unreal’s Level Sequencer to do this. The biggest issue that I had was setting animations for the bosses through the Level Sequencer. The problem was the bosses had animation blueprint set on their meshes by default. If an actor already has an animation blueprint, it will always default to that and ignore any other animations. To fix this, I set the skeletal meshes not to have an animation blueprint by default. It isn’t until the cutscene is over that the proper animation blueprint gets assigned to the bosses during runtime.

I also added a various amount of sound effects and visual effects to make the game look more complete. These were our final changes before we submit our final build and I am satisfied with the work I did this week. I also plan to continue polishing our game next week before we present at Full Sail’s Project Showcase.