Project Slashafras: Week 2
Welcome to my game dev journey of creating Project Slashafras from the ground up. I'm Jacob and for the past couple weeks I have been working on character death poses, bugs, and creating these basic test areas for our Archer Enemy.
First, let's fix a bug that I found with the player. Figuring out why the player's death was so weird was a challenge. You see, I was checking the health the wrong way. I needed to check if the player was at or below 0 health, which is correct, but the logic behind it caused this bug to occur. Before, I would check the health amount and complete the hit react logic, then deduct health. This caused the player to stay alive at 0 health until they were hit again. So I found this error and switched it around. Worked perfectly after that.
Getting the proper player death animation to play was simpler because I already had the code for the hit react, I simply needed to implement it into the death react direction and add a state to the animation blueprint.
Enemies were a tad bit more difficult. I figured out an issue where the enemy would continue to change states even when dead. This would cause the enemy to continue rotating towards the player while in the death pose on the ground. Because we were only checking for an Enemy state, the state would change if the enemy saw the player again, even at 0 health. It took me a while to figure this out, but the answer was pretty simple. Check if the player was at 0 health, and if they were, don’t do anything. Then have the character be destroyed and disappear after a few seconds.
The test areas are used to come up with different ways enemies can interact with the player. These include 2 patrolling areas and 2 guard areas. The patrolling areas were created to have enemies moving around a specific obstacle, area, or path. This helps show how the enemies will react when the player enters one of these areas. These patrols can be used to create encounters where the player is trying to get somewhere but can easily be spotted if not careful. Patrols can also help the world feel more alive with more movement. Stationary guard enemies create easy targets for the player, while they can also signify a major area or milestone for the player. Having fewer enemies indicates easy targets the player can take out quickly. For example, if they’re guarding an alleyway, the player can run up and take them out, then disappear down the alley to escape being seen. Multitudes of guards can indicate a major area the player must get to, a major milestone where they are testing their skills and abilities, or they can be used to block off areas where the player is not allowed to be. This can be a small challenge for advancing the story, or blocking the player from moving any further until they either find a way around it or complete tasks in the story before the path is unlocked.
Overall, the past couple weeks have been busy so I have not been able to accomplish more, but I need to put my head down and work when I can. Currently the game is progressing, slowly, but progression is better than nothing.
Thank you all for reading this far and I will keep you updated. To see my journey up to this point, feel free to watch my previous devlogs on YouTube.
