Container City. Level design Week 2

This week has been pretty standard one of just modelling and texturing for me after the first day which I spent looking into setting up footstep sounds when the player is walking. Had the play style been in third person then it would have been a breeze but the fact that the first person game code was a floating pair of arms made it more difficult. Still, I found a way around it using a line trace ray as the point of contact to read the type of material the player was on but for some reason the Unreal editor wouldn't let me call the node that would tell the sound when to play into the blueprint so after spending what felt like an eternity trying to get the final piece to work, it was time to drop it and possibly return when more pressing matters where dealt with.

My first focus was getting the panels textured. The models had already been swapped out with the placeholders in engine and we wanted to get there final textures in place so the lighting could really start to be finalised.

As well as that I needed to get any assets unique to the maintenance levels modeled and textured such as the generator and some kind of power switch to hook up to the interactive emergency lighting I have planned for the lower levels.

This week I also got the water shader sorted for the flooded lower levels. I wanted to get a bit of colour into it like the water had been stagnant for a while but in the end the clear water just worked out better.

I got the Blueprint for the locked gate done. This was made using a basic inventory system to check if the player has picked up the key from the office.

The key gave me a fair bit of trouble as it would get picked up just from the player standing close to it which takes away from the exploration side of the level we were going for so preferably, we needed the player to interact with the key to pick it up. I asked a tutor if he had any ideas but he seemed just as confused as I did to why it wasn't working so it seemed like I was just going to have to put up with it, then about 8 PM I'm staring at the Blueprint and spot the very simple change I could make by adding a pressed node before the 'add to inventory' action.