March 25th Weekly Update (Patreon)

The one last game system I wanted to get built was the ability to interact with objects in the world( a Use system).  This week I got the hierarchies for that built.  I was also able to build a simple item pickup, and rebuild the charm as part of this system.

Like previously, when you get close to an enemy, you have the option to charm them, however, now it involves a QTE like minigame of tapping a button rapidly.  It isn't very difficult, and I don't think I'll make it difficult(at least for most enemies...), but its a little bit of an extra gameplay element I can do things with.  

Charmed enemies now appropriately follow the player around, and act as an ally.

To start all the loves scenes, I want to have a little more then a quick fade, and to that end, I've been looking at Unreal Engine's cinematic tool, Sequencer.  Its a really nice tool built for cutscenes, that allows you do move and animate objects in the scene, as well as animate cinematic cameras.  It really is a convenient tool, but its built currently primarily as a tool for static cutscenes.

I've been trying to leverage it for the more dynamic cutscenes I would need, and with each update to Unreal, it gets closer, but never quite to the place where its useful.

The newly released Unreal engine 4.19 seemed to have the last piece of the puzzle, being able to dynamically set the location, and so I put a lot of time into building tests for that.  Unfortunately, it requires the sequence to be built into the scene, and the pivot for moving its location set in the editor, so it won't quite work how I want it to.  

TL;DR  Unreal Engine is cucking me with sequencer so hard, and I wish they would stop.

In the long run, this just means I need to put together my own class to do the same thing, but in a more obtuse way, and a little more slowly.  I'm just bummed it was so close to being super convenient!

So half the week was pretty good, the other half, kinda  disappointing, but the stuff moving forward should be more fun `~_^