V0.1.3-Devlog-EN

Floating platforms and AOE attacks

Author: Eyon Norman

07/25/2024

The problem

For the most damaging attack for our boss we decided to go with an AOE attack which would lift the boss off the ground and make him immune for a short while. The AOE needed an indicator below the players feet that tells the player that they should move or they would get hit.  The Main problem was how we would get the boss to float off the ground, and how we would get the indicators below the players feet.

The solution

I created a FloatingPlatform Blueprint that i used to have a static mesh move its Z value(up in the world) over time with a timeline. I also made it to where it goes in reverse. The way that that works is after the timeline is done it calls an event dispatcher that we bind on our Boss blueprint. We have a start and stop float event. The start float spawns the actor below the boss' feet and waits until the event dispatcher from FloatingPlatform, From there stop float does the reverse. It grabs the mesh from the point that it is and returns the z value back to 0. once it reaches 0 the platform is destroyed.
The AOE consists of 3 different Blueprints. theres a base AOE blueprint an AOE BlastBase blueprint and an AOE Strike blueprint. The Regular base AOE takes care of most of what we would want if we make more AOE classes, A debug sphere that you can call and the overlap event. The Blast base blueprint is what houses the Particle system as a variable so we can set it in a child class. Here we can also set a sound. The AOE Strike blueprint is where we Spawn a decal at a location, that location being where the player is. We then cast a line trace to the floor ignoring the attack target(which is the player) that way the decal doesnt get interrupted by the mesh of the player. It then sets that location to the floor below the players feet.

for further explanation and a look at the blueprints i linked a video