Devlog 4: Sean Jeffries: Hiatus & Bug Fixes

Due to power outages from the weather, I lost half my week of potential work.
This past sprint one of the interesting things I worked on was creating a melee ability for the wizard. Luckily we had an animation that worked for the melee ability so I was able to quickly create a new gameplay ability for the GAS (Gameplay Ability System).

Inside I was able to play the animation montage and have the effect wait to make sure I made contact with an enemy and not some random object or the air.

To check for overlap I added a collision box attached to the child actor staff that moves with the staff. The collision obviously being turned to overlap all and I set the generate overlap events to be off by default so it was not constantly triggering.

Inside the animation montage I created two AnimNotify's (Badly named, I need to go back and figure out how to rename them or recreate them). The notifies allow me to trigger the overlap events at a specific time during the attack sequence, giving me solid control over the interaction and reducing overlap triggers.

Inside the wizard, when the overlap happens, I am able to send the tags to the GAS so that the effect, which sends damage through the system, is appplied.

I also had to resolve an issue where the jump ending animation was delayed and looked unfinished. In order to resolve this I added a line trace to the ABP update animation event to check for distance to the ground. Allowing me to trigger the landing animation as I approach the ground, instead of how I previously had it set up, which would trigger the animation when the wizard was no longer in the air.

There was another bug we had experienced where the camera would clip through the wall on the right side. After some research I realized we had be setting the camera incorrectly. Instead of changing the relative location of the spring arm and the camera, we needed to use the socket offset to create our over the shoulder view. And as a result I ran into an issue where the camera would end up inside the player, which I resolved by checking the distance of the camera from the character mesh to decide when to make the mesh invisible, making it feel like your looking through the players eyes while backed up against a wall.

Our team is moving onto other projects for the foreseeable future. We all wish to come back and complete this game at some point, see you again.