Project Type: Prototype 

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.23.1 

Language: C++

This Devlog will focus on what's behind the hood of the player and the trap system.

Trap Spawning System

For the trap system we needed a very intelligent and easy to use system.
Patterns should be made automatically and take into account the surroundings + the animation width and length of other traps.

We started from the basics of the old prototype of the grid spawning, but quickly changed this up to have a more elaborate and specific system.

We made it easy to add new traps to the randomization, and quickly elevated this to also allow to choose the count of how many our system tries to spawn per wave.

Each trap has data that will call it's own function based on the size of the spawn area.
This includes a certain extend to initialize the extends that an animation goes to.

Combining all this together and on top of that adding animation blueprints to do timing, allowed us to get a very flexible system that can spawn traps easily in waves. The waves are automatically triggered when there are no traps in the grid anymore (done with a collider).

To do the animations, we used an animation blueprint and variables saying whether the trap is activated.
Additionally we also added a hierarchy with hit components (colliders) to follow the bone animation, since we are mainly using skeletal meshes.

https://streamable.com/z77fq

Player Animation Blueprint

To give the player more accessibility and feeling of actually doing something, we implemented simple animations in deadbeat.
This was done through simple blueprinting, which ended up pretty well. 

Using  a State Machine was an easy and accessible option. So that's how we did it!

Eventually by adding animations and BlendSpaces for the idle/run, as well as several transition animations, we ended up with the following result; which is a nice basis for the DEADBEAT project.

https://streamable.com/lao1i

Pick-Ups

The pickups are again a simple but powerful mechanic. At this certain moment they still don't do that much, but the idea is there! They can be picked up, and used by using your special ability!

That's it for this week! Thank you so much for reading our Devlogs! 

- The DEADBEAT Team.