BATTLE YOUR DEMONS
BATTLE YOUR DEMONS UE4 GAME MECHANICSÂ AND OTHER ITEMS
Here, I will go over some of the main mechanics I made in Battle Your Demons and other things I did, explaining what they are and how they were made. If you would like to see a full description of the games production then click here to go to the dev log and download.
CONTENTS FILING SYSTEM
The first thing I did once the project had been set up was to sort out an easy to navigate filing system. So, I followed the steps as for my first game, made separate folders for each level which would hold all level specific items. An all-levels folder containing items that would be present in every level and colour coded them in the same colour as what they were in UE4. Texture folders were red, blueprint folders are dark blue etc.
This made it much easier for me to navigate and find what I needed fast.
ANIMATED TRAPS
For my animated water, acid and lava traps I created several different flipbooks for each. For example, the acid trap has 5 sprites altogether, so I started with sprites 1,2,3,4,5 creating the first flipbook. Then I went for 2,3,4,5,1 and so on until I got a flipbook which started from a different sprite.
I did it this way so when I put the blueprints together using the flipbooks, the animation would look seamless.
HAPPINESS BAR DEPLETION
Since the game is set in a shadow realm which contains the demons that can overtake you when suffering with mental health problems. I wanted to have it so the characters happiness is constantly being drained whilst in this realm. The player must grab a pickup to increase their happiness while going through the levels.
So, I added a custom event in Claire’s blueprint that would deplete her happiness overtime. And if it reached 0 then she would go into her ‘demon’ state which is one of the game over scenarios. This would in turn take you through to one of the game over screens where you can restart or go back to the main menu.
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​I also set up a simple respawn test for both her health and happiness reaching 0, just to check if the level restarted.
WALL JUMPING
This was the first new mechanic I added to the game that wasn’t in my last one. The reasoning behind the wall jump is that the character has traveled to the shadow realm to defeat her shadow demons that represent her mental health, and nothing is going to stand in her way, even high walls that should be impossible to climb. So, it is meant to represent that no matter how difficult things get, if you try hard enough then nothing can stop you from achieving your goal, whatever it is.
Image 1
I set up a custom event which led into a ‘Line Trace By Channel’ node. As far as I know when combined with the logic placed beforehand, this node puts out a ‘line’ from the characters capsule component to check if they have hit a vertical wall based on the distance plus float. And if the line is within range, then it will activate the wall jump.
Image 2
The second part is set up to determine the axis you want to affect, which in this case is the X-axis. And then it will jump up based on the jump Z velocity value, which uses the characters base jump value from their character movement.
