FMP 3 - Everything is on fire!

This week paid off massively! Me and Haz managed to work through a blueprint that allows the fire character to burn across ropes, and it feels really fun to do. This was perhaps one of the hardest pieces of blueprinting as it required a lot of checking of when the player enters certain collision volumes but we managed to find a way that it could work (probably not the best way to program it but at least it is functional for now.)

Here is a quick video anyway showing the mechanic in motion:

As you can see there are some other things working aswell, like picking up objects such as keys and pushing and burning crates if the fire guy comes too close. Here is a bit of a blueprint dump to show the different systems are working so far:

Rope Burning Construction BP

First up is the big one: the rope burning blueprint, this may not be the most efficient way of getting the effect we wanted but it's the only way we could get working for now. It works exactly how it is supposed to aswell without any major changes needed later down the line. The image above shows the construction script, which creates the spline and sets the location of the end meshes to either end of the spline, it also handles the size of the rope's trigger volumes which can be altered in the editor.

The next image is the main graph, this is the bit which taken the most time as we couldn't figure out how to make sure the character didn't keep reactivating the trigger at the other end. This meant the fire guy would just travel back and forth on the rope endlessly, we fixed this by creating an 'OnWire' variable that would disable the input while true aswell as other checks that detect the direction of travel.

Rope Burning BP

Another thing that needed to be worked on was a key object that could unlock gates, this was fairly simple to figure out I just needed to set the key to the same character that interacted with it, something that did need to be tweaked however was that if the character is switched that the key stopped following, so I needed to add in a section that made the key keep following the character that picked it up, even after the player has switched character. (Yet another example of how switchable characters cause extra challenges)

Key Object BP

Another mechanic needed for the fire guy was the burnable crates, which set alight when the player passes near a crate, this is used as the focus of a few puzzles. The blueprint works by triggering an event when the player gets close enough, that then creates a sphere trace for other burnable objects around it and triggers a similar event in those objects.

Burning Crate BP

I also made this BP a bit more flexible by adding in some construction script allowing me to swap out the static mesh and change the trigger bounds. This means I can get a lot more than just burnable crates from this BP and create burning planks, fences and platforms.

Burning Crate Construction BP

Here is also a google drive folder containing some full res images, for your viewing pleasure:

Google Drive - Blueprint Screens

Next week, continued blueprinting plus some level design. :)