Blog 14: 1/29-2/4
This week, I finished the metrics gym for my level based on The Long Dark and began work on the actual level. The main thing I wanted to complete for the metrics gym was the mechanics for the bear to chase the player. Originally, I was planning to use Unreal's AI Behavior Tree tools, but after looking into it more it felt too complicated for what I wanted the bear to be able to do.
I continued to work on the Blueprint I was working with last week and hooked up a walking animation. I also tweaked it so that every few seconds, it would check whether or not it could still see the player and decide whether to continue chasing the player or stop. If the bear runs into the player, the player character will die and the level will restart, since bears are unkillable in melee combat in The Long Dark.
I worked a bit more on the metrics level and added grid materials to everything, but ended up leaving the majority of the rest of the gym as it was. I would have liked to work a bit more on the bear, and maybe still will before the level is complete, since the bear kill is very jarring at the moment, but I was sick and didn't have the energy to add much polish before the gym was due.
Once I was feeling better, though, I started working on the actual level. I created two simple assets in Maya to start building the level--a pine tree and a section of railway--and then imported them into Unreal. I created a foliage asset with the tree in Unreal and tweaked the settings to allow some variation in size and position. I had made simple foliage assets before in the past, and something I struggled with somewhat frequently was with getting trees to stand up straight and not align with the angle of the ground, so I was excited to realize there was an easy spot to uncheck a box and get all of the trees to be placed pointing up.
I also brought in the railway piece. Originally, I was planning to just duplicate it over and over along the path of the tracks, but then I remembered the spline tool we had created last semester in class and decided to try recreating it. I had struggled a bit in class last semester to get the pipes we added to the spline to show up correctly, so I was very happy to figure out where I had gone wrong and get the tracks to place correctly along the spline. Once I had the spline Blueprint set up, it was very easy to adjust the position and length of the track through the environment.
Finally, I started blocking out the train station itself. I'm planning to use CubeGrid for at least the largest shapes of the station; once I realized you weren't stuck using 1mx1m cubes all the time, I became a big CubeGrid appreciator. I started to block out the shape of the station, but I quickly realized that a perfectly rectangular building wasn't going to be very realistic or interesting. I'm planning to go back to my reference board and find some more references for the shape and size of the building to get a good feel for the type of building I'm making before going back into modeling the station.
