New Features and Improvement Made
IK Leg
Aurora's legs now sit nicely on any surface her foot lands on. This was so much easier to setup in Unreal Engine 5.0 using the new Control Rig feature and the Full Body IK function which are available only for UE5.
Since I have learnt a great deal about Control Rigs in the past month, it was easy to understand how the Leg IK was setup in the Mannequin 5 default character and then copy them to Aurora.
Easy peasy, simple and clean. Setting this up on UE4 without those features was a nightmare.
Save System
The game now has a Save feature. Yay. Players can now Resume the game.
This was a challenge to do in the beginning because for one, Aurora's death count is tied, one-way, to the Ice Sculpture actors in the scene.
There were other complications too but I've managed to overcome them. The system was done in C++.
- When the game loads, Aurora will be where she was, with any headgear she equipped in the last save.
- Her attribute states are also perserved.
- However, if the last save was her currently engaged in an enemy wave, she will spawn without one as it is not appropriate to do so (as almost all games do these days).
BUT triggering the enemy spawner after loading will continue from the last wave count and increment. It will not reset to the beginning 1/2 for example.
- The game also has an auto-save feature, which will auto-save:
- Every 2.5 minutes,
- When the Quit button in the Pause Menu is clicked,
- When Aurora revives,
- When the End Credits has finished rolling (so players can visit the level again for any end game theatrics *hint hint).
There is also the Reset Level option which will ... reset everything. This means the save file will be deleted, and player starts in a fresh new game.
Achievements
This took me about 70% of total development time for this version, but I had successfully got it done! This system was also done in C++.
There are 10 achievements.
A couple of them are secret achievements. 😁
The achievements and their description can be viewed in the Pause Menu, along with hints (tooltip) for each one.
Achievement unlocks and progress are saved across all playthroughs! (unless you delete the local files in the app data.)
There is notification queue-ing functionality. This means if 2 or more achievements are unlocked at the same time, one notification will be displayed only after the other has done so.
Do ask me about how I went about developing this feature. It is quite a task. 😄
Analytics
Yes, using the free GameAnalytics. I added some design events at some points in the game.😁
Improvements and fixes
- HUD and UI Rework - A bit better on the eyes.
- Pause Menu now has soothing music. Also, you can now tap the ESC key again to close the Pause Menu.
- Disabled the Async Loading plugin, and removed functionality. It simply did not work at all even in version 1.0 - I can still see a black screen.
I tried using the level streaming method but that broke a bunch of stuff in the game. Now, there is simply no loading screen, just a fake one that I forced to
show for 5 seconds (because I want to display the hints). The UE Logo movie will play fully now.
- Health Bar will now increase its length to a factor of how much Max Health was added after a Revive.
- Blast Ability - It no longer blends to a fixed camera but will use her own instead. It also has camera shake now. This is way cooler.
- Converted the particles for the fragments from Cascade to Niagara with ribbon renderer. Spawn Rate was 2000 with Cascade. Now it's just 100. LOL.
- Other improvements and bug fixes which I've made but I could not recall at this moment, else this list will go on and on. 😁
