Devblog Update #66: Animal Rescue, Audio, and Gamepads!

Share this post:

The second mission on Mt. Eldur is complete! I don't want to give too many spoilers, but let's just say that Dragons can withstand heat better than baby "Moledillos". I had to program a few new elements of gameplay that I definitely want to go back and add to previous levels to spice them up a bit.

One of those is a post-processing effect that gets stronger the closer you get to a certain point (In this case in particular it's also controlled by time spent inside a certain area). That can result in some pretty neat dynamics! In a game like this, we don't have a health-bar, which takes away a valuable "currency" a lot of games can leverage to add a "cost", or risk to doing a certain activity. Future games will have that, but in this one, we're having to make do by being creative and finding other "currencies" to work with.

--------------------------------------

Aaron has been working on getting the Audio up to scratch! He composed some awesome music already, and is starting to work his way through the placeholder sfx we had previously implemented into the game. It's really great having him on the team, and I'm excited to hear what the game sounds like by the end!

--------------------------------------

Another big project that I've started working my way through, is making sure the UI is completely gamepad compatible. Turns out, that's not as straightforward in Unreal Engine as I had expected! Thankfully, I found a plugin that carries a lot of that complexity for me, and I just have to re-factor my existing UI to work with it: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/uinavigation

--------------------------------------

Here's the timelapse video of making the mountain goat creature!