Freelance Year Week 3 Ludum Dare and Level Design Jam

To start off the week the team finished off the Ludum Dare game jam project, on the last day after a little deliberation I was asked to make a key model for the locked doors at the end of the puzzles. Although the model was very simple to make with just a few basic shapes such as cylinders and rings, I wanted to add smaller details that make the key more realistic namely the shaft of the key was connected to the bow (the ring) via a boolean and then target welding the vertices together, in order to create the appearance of a screw that connected the two parts together. I also added numerous bevels that would be used for the scratches mask in substance painter.

After the project was handed in I took a short break then got to work on the Level design jam. I wrote out a few ideas for a non linear level which is the theme. My first Idea was a level were the player could spawn and despawn walls and floors to create new routes through the environment using the Q and E keys similar to the Effect and Cause level from Titanfall 2. The level could also have a grapple hook and wall running to increase the player's manoeuvrability and adding new ways to get through the environment.

The second idea was the weakest in my opinion as all it involved was collecting boxes or some type of items form around a city before they are killed how they got to the objectives was up to them.

The final idea was based of a game I made in my first year which was a stealth game where you would sneak through the environment collecting intel until you could exit the area. It would mainly be inspired by the new Deus Ex games however I believe that the stealth AI would not only take to long to make but it would take too long to bugfix if there was any issues taking away from creating the actual level.

Overall I went with the first idea as the mechanics seemed both interesting to play around with and that the design of the level could be very interesting.

Finally for this week I hopped into UE5 to start the creating the initial mechanic spawning and despawning walls and floors. Firstly I researched how some other people created the mechanic including interviews about Titanfall 2's developers about the level that inspired this idea however I ended up using a official Unreal Engine tutorial on how to spawn and despawn an actor. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/ProgrammingAndScripting/SpawnAndDestroyActors/

I read through the tutorial adapting the instructions to suit what I was doing with my game such as using a cube not a sphere.

When I completed the blueprints I attempted to test them however I found that the actors would spawn but not despawn on the button presses so I removed the for each loop with break and that made the actors despawn. However I then found that when multiple emitters were placed the button pressed would only spawn a single platform, to fix this I changed the get actor of class to get all actors of class which fixed this issue but also a potential issue of the player accidently spawning multiple of the same platforms as the despawn deletes all of the actors.