I’ve now finished Level 10 and also added a box in which the player is teleported to after they finish Level 10. More info below.
The image you see below is Level 10 in which I have re-designed the ‘pendulum’ objects to be more mechanical like as if they’re rotated around by a Cylinder object. The top and bottom rectangle objects spin in a counter-clock-wise fashion whereas the middle rectangle spins in a clock-wise fashion.
The four objects near the end of the level are designed to push the enemy off the level. The objects on the left move at the same time and speed, the same goes for the objects on the right. I animated these using matinee.
You can also see the goal in the middle of the stage, this is because I’ve still kept the idea for when the player presses down onto the sandstone button (where the ball is in the picture), the goal slides all the way to the end of the stage, tricking the player into thinking they’re in for an easy win. I did this by using a matinee actor for the sandstone object to sink into the ground when the ball overlaps the trigger element, which then plays the matinee event. This took a while to figure out and I owe it to my classmate Tony for helping me with this, turns out there’s a thing called Level Blueprints. I knew exactly what to do but I just couldn’t do it in normal blueprints, so I should keep in mind that there are functions I may not be able to perform in normal blueprints. Once the button (the sandstone object) is pressed onto, the other matinee event to make the goal slide all the way back is also played. The ring near the end is just a spinning ring, a cool effect I decided to add for the sake of cool basically.
After the player finishes the 10th level they are then teleported to a room half-encased in 4 rectangles informing the player they’ve won. It’s a bit of a silly room, yes. If the player goes to either the far right or left side of the box they are then teleported back to the first level using a ‘Set actor location’ node using the kill boxes blueprint below the first level. The Banana object I have placed into the room is an easter egg reference to the game in which I’ve based my game on, Super Monkey Ball. And the Shadow the Hedgehog character is just a T-stance model which I will soon remove, it’s only in there for fun and to see how it works, though if I can find a way to animate it I might just leave it in there for the sake of how ridiculous it is. I created the object by using the sign object I created in 3DS Max for the second level but just made a different version of it and applied a text image I made in Photoshop.
To achieve past the basic Pass criteria in my assignment I needed one more kind of input, at first I tried to put in a double-jump feature but I felt like that would just ruin the flow of the game as well as giving SMB fans a bad taste since jumping was NEVER a part of SMB; which basically increased the challenge by adding that limitation. The single jump gameplay element still exists in my game because many people always wanted to jump in SMB, so I left it in for people to see what it’s sort of like and since my game won’t ever be using the same gameplay elements or functions (such as the physics of the SMB ball) I’ve decided to keep it in as it makes the game quite fun and allows the player to play the game in multiple different ways. It’s also been useful as I can build levels based on it.
Anyways, the feature I added in was to push a single button in Level 5 to bring up the cylinders in quite a cool way (they basically come up at different speeds depending on the row of cylinders, you’ll see what I mean if you play it, it’s pretty rad). The player must use the ‘E’ key when they are up against the button to push it in (using a matinee and trigger event) event which will then bring up the cylinders (using a matinee event caused by the trigger element with the button) which the player can then cross to beat the level. I decided to create text to put up against the button and box to tell the player what they need to do, other than just guess what key you need to use to bring the cylinders up. I did this by receiving help from my classmate Tony who showed me how to create text, as well as make it so it is destroyed after a certain event occurs, in this case pushing the button. Seeing as how putting text into a game in UE4 is quite simple I’ll most likely be doing this more in the future as it is a BIG time saver, rather than having to create a sign in 3DS Max.
Now with the levels finally completed, I can move onto creating a landscape with mountains trees and more. Then I can start creating some visual effects too. Hopefully, this shouldn’t be too hard…
Here is an image of the Level Blueprint so you can see just how I managed to do the whole ‘matinee event activated via trigger element’ functions.
If you’re interested in seeing anything else to do with how I made certain things in my project, please say.
