Hello again dear readers,
Wow, it feels like it has been some time since we last caught up! I believe last time we talked I had gotten started on my first puzzle and creating some meshes in Blender. Since then I have worked on several things in addition to that and I must say…the area is really starting to look like a tomb! It is exciting to see all the little pieces coming together and each challenge I face in making my puzzles and the room is giving me more and more experience in Unreal and Blender. I would have to say that the biggest challenge I faced this week was creating a combination lock for a treasure chest.
A treasure chest containing a key item that is sealed with a combination lock is one of my puzzles in my Egypt level. I had been thinking for some time in how to implement this and realized before even starting on it that I would have to use ray-casting for the precision required to hone in on an individual dial to turn. This was actually relatively easy as Grabber works in the same way so I just created the same functionality for interacting with items using Unreal’s blueprints. The biggest challenge lay in creating the chest and dials in Blender. I got plenty of practice in creating materials and applying them to individual faces which is something I’m happy about. However I do wish I had some skill in sculpting and modeling in Blender. I created the chest using neither of these tools; it’s just a hollowed out cube with a flattened one laying on top of it. I have seen some amazing sculpting done on youtube though which makes me jealous of the artist’s skill!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCUM_HJsDOw
I have always wanted to be able to create my own quality assets, import them into my game, and then program their functionality. Sadly though, I think I will have to either buy assets or hire an artist for any future endeavors into making games, as I am not artistic in that way and I know it takes many years to develop one’s skill. I did end up buying a few assets this week for canopic jars and a mummy. For the chest though I created it using simple shapes such as cubes and cylinders. It was interesting learning the Egyptian numbering and math systems! They don’t work quite the way ours do. Symbols represent different levels of the tens place such as: 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc. To represent a number, a certain number of each type of symbol is written next to each other. So for my puzzle two numbers will be written on the wall and the player will have to add them and input the answer into the chest using the hieroglyphic symbols. I had thought about using English numbering system on the dials but I want everything to be consistent with the time period.
It is exciting to see that most of the functionality is there for the minimum number of puzzles required; as we are only half way through the term, I will begin thinking of an additional puzzle or two to add to my level…maybe one that works to the player’s detriment instead of advancing them? Another exciting feature that I would like to work on if time allows is getting the mummy skeletal mesh that I’m going to import to move. It would be pretty cool I think if I could get that going using blueprints and manipulating skeletal meshes is something I don’t know anything about so that will be exciting to learn. The interact functionality I’ve implemented is quite flexible so I’m pretty sure I could allow the player to interact with the mummy as well.
I will keep you updated with what develops!
