Final Year Development Blog 6 - First Events, Finished Script and Neighbourhood Progress

With days 1 and 2 of the script finished I have decided to start making the actual events for the game.

Before I begin I have to set up the Level Streaming for the game and this takes some foresight. I have decided that the entire neighbourhood would be in the persistent level and the Event Triggers for Days 1 and 2 would be in their own separate levels this way I can use their own Level Blueprints at the same time. Here is a screenshot of how its all set up.

This gif shows how level streaming works. You have 2 seperate levels taking up the same space but you can load and unload the levels. As soon as Day 1 ends I can unload it then load Day 2. In the case of my game however I will be loading and unloading Triggers not whole levels until the final Day. This way the entire Neighbourhood which is in the persistent level isn't touched at all and so this make sure the frame rate stays constant.

Here is the blueprint of setting up the Wake up event, Here I decided to use Level sequence and widgets to create the animation of waking up and to get text on the screen. So because I want the Level sequence to play as soon as the player clicks begin on the Title Screen so I will put the blueprints inside the Click Event of the Title Screen Widget.

I will now be detailing how I made the Text animations. In a Widget Blueprint I created each line of text on it own and then got the opacity and colour of each line and animated by turning them on and off on a timeline.

This is all the text overlayed on top each other and below is the timeline increasing and decreasing the opacity for when I want the text to pop up.

Here is the Neighbourhood progress for this week.

I want to talk a little bit about the green lines you see. I have used something called landscape Splines for the pathways in the park. Instead of having to put each piece down on its own I can simply drag a spline and create new spline points and the assets will be put down to fill out the space between the two points. Here is how its done.

First of all you want to create 2 spline points. You do this by CTRL clicking twice and you should have this green square appear.

You will then Click the middle green part and select the mesh you wish to use in the bottom right hand side.

You will then want to uncheck the Scale to width box this makes sure the spline will be the width of the mesh itself.

Finally you will then click on the second spline point you made and the CTRL click to make other spline points and done! you will mesh appear between the various spline points.

Finally this is the completed script.