Blog Posts

Start UI Inv Bar

6/1/2023

2 Hours
Had the idea for consistent interaction usage for any kind "items". At least anything the player can pick-up. Right now its just the knife/weapon. Though throwable junk, keys, usables, etc would be nice to have and be maintained by a consistent system of, "you need a free hand to pick-up" and items need to be stores in the limited hot-bar or dropped to have said free hand.
TLDR I started making a UI hot-bar and an animation of it sliding in and out of the bottom of the screen.

Videos and Active Behind Detection

5/25/2023

45 minutes at 8pm, and then another 45 at 1am
First sit down was just tediously recording videos to showcase the current state of mechanics so I can RETROACTIVELY upload and edit them into the log posts actually mentioning them. Make these slightly more worth reading in retrospect.
Second was me realizing the issue of only ever checking for "Behind" upon begin and end overlaps - where I want it (like many prompt options, maybe including picking up things or general interactions) to simply switch the moment it can be. For example the enemy alert is at 3, they player is overlapping the behind collider but not showing the prompt because alert is too high. Though then when it lowers, the player has already "begun" the overlap and so the prompt doesn't appear until they leave and then reenter. Big cringe dont like - so I fixed it by making it check specific actor overlap on the player tick event. Begin overlap now just grabs the "current enemy behind actor" to check against, and it works woooo.

Stealth Kill and Alert

5/24/2023

1.5 hours
Already had a death state on the enemy (kill collision and rotate/locate face down onto the ground) and so just needed to link a slash while "behind" to instantly kill. Extremely basic but still satisfying. Though reminded me this should only be possible when unnoticed or not doing alert state for the enemy
Tossed an integer on the enemy that is cast to and searched for before "isBehind" is decided for the player. Then prompting me to want to toss a trigger collision cone mesh on the enemy's face and set a very basic alert functionality. Max alert when seen, and then a looping timer when not seen to count down the 3 other alert levels before hitting zero.

Cleaning Components (Mostly)

5/23/2023

2.5 Hours
Fixed the "Behind enemy" overlap detection - had the tag on the wrong component.
Misc Player and Enemy component collider and mesh adjustments. Found I think a good middle ground of camera perspective within the capsule and seeing the meshes when looking down while also not clipping through walls.
Main issue in this regard now is just the weapon still clipping through most things despite constant fiddling to bring it closer within the capsule while "animating". Might eventually bite the bullet to try complicated render math. Hope is for the player to hold many different things and not worry about clipping so tbd tbh.

Collision Issues

5/22/2023

Like a little less than 2 hours
Broke and trying to fix the collisions and spacing between player character and enemy. Half motivated by wanting to give the player a body so the spacing of an item held and how it interacts with the enemy looks and makes sense.
Effectively a mess at the moment - getting tedious to troubleshoot multiple volume component overlap collisions.

Crouch Knife

5/17/2023

Intended for an hour, ended up being almost two.
Threw a box collider on the enemies back and added logic to detect when the player is currently behind an enemy. Intended for eventual stealth take-downs.
Figured out how to reference the Knife BP the player picks up, and threw on a timeline lerp animation transition between holding it upright while standing and flipped downward while crouched.

Dev blog

5/17/2023

Actually today, like 5 hours on and off trying to focus.
Making this stupid dev blog + log formatting.
- Did no actual engine work despite having it open the whole time.
- Earlier shower thoughts a bunch of more misc design scatter brain notes for the google doc.

Stab guy

5/17/2023

This past Sunday - few hours I don't remember.
More like a slash - stupid basic timeline animation of knife swinging.
Added enemy made of white meshes.
- added knife collision detection via tag to damage and kill.
- kill is the enemy faceplanting where they stood.

More mantle

5/17/2023

Several more hours, maybe in one night maybe across a few.
Made the mantle more accurate and robust (I think).
- Added more raycasts and variable pull up "animations" depending on how high the climb and if player is in the air or not. (Quick, Normal, Slow)
- Made the unreal gun a knife to pick up.

Mantle

5/16/2023

Probably 3-5 hours, I don't remember. Also like a week and a half ago.
Trying idea of raycasting for mantling and it worked (with jury ringing) yay.