Player Movement And Other Features | Tech Discussion

For this post, we are discussing the implementation of rolling, dodge, audio, and the test level design. All of these were implemented via Blueprints, the Animation System in Unreal, and the Level Editor.  

Rolling and Dodge were done in the character movement. There was a struggle for a bit to figure out how to make sure on what to do to make sure that dodge happens when there is no player movement input and roll when there is. I found out that in Blueprints I could make a macro that helps with registering if there was a movement input. I also made a function that played the animation montage fully without being interrupted currently. There will need to be a system later implemented that allows for interruption so that way we can include stagger as a mechanic. Dodge is still not perfect as the animation for it is a reverse roll animation as we currently do not have a back step animation. The roll will eventually be a directional roll that will have a max degree set as well as a max rotation to make the future motion smooth.

The audio was easier to implement than anticipated by just dragging and dropping the cue into the scene. Attaching audio to animations was interesting as we attached a temporary walking on grass sound to both the walk and run animations by using a notify system on the animation timeline to give the user a better auditory experience. We hope to implement audio assets in the future that reflect the world that we will be building but for now, it was to learn the techniques and how to apply them to our current build.

The level design we decided to keep it simple by only adding a directional light to a scene of a basic room with a small wall and box in it. We wanted to have a level complex enough to test functionality but simple enough to where we were not overwhelming ourselves with a full level on top of the many other systems we were implementing this week. The only difficulty encountered when making this level was that we did not realize that a plane would not provide flooring to the level and when testing the player fell into the infinite void. To correct this we took out the plane and just placed a box underneath the level for looring.

Author: Amara Gitomer