Ice Ice Baby
Hello! Thanks for reading this weeks update! Things are getting cold outside! Better stay bundled up… Ok… not really. It’s April. Not really a cold month here in Florida. But! Things certainly have gotten a lot cooler in Sid’s Adventure. This week there was a big push to add some final touches to the build. After today, there isn’t supposed to be much active development happening so it was down to the wire to finalize the last high priority features.
The first things that I wanted to tackle was the Cooling Zone. This level was very underwhelming before. It was basically just a single room. Hop on some platforms and get a key. I switched tickets to work on the boss AI as I felt that was going to take much longer than some level design. Now with adequate time I added some more depth and challenge. I added level music for each area too. So now each area feels unique to play through. I added an air vent system to the level to have some snowfall which I thought would be cool since it’s supposed to be a frozen area.
I also added the terrifying exploding spiders to this level. I haven’t found a valid reason they belong here yet story wise but I’m working up to that. The floor in this entire area is slipery so trying to make your way and NOT fall into the freon liquid below is a real challenge. In conjunction with that trying to fend off this many spiders is really tough. If these guys are close enough they can kill you in a single blast. For those who love secrets… I’ve left a very cool easter egg in this level for anyone who is up to the challenge of finding it!
On the topic of challenges… one thing I had a really difficult time with this week was creating user settings. This includes a wide variety of options you’d expect to be in a game like this. I created various menus for Settings->Audio->Controller->Graphics. Creating graphics settings and testing them in the Unreal Engine viewport is impossible. So every change I made I needed to build the project which can be time consuming. But overall with some patience and a decent processor I was able to get everything working. Next month is where we start to really polish the project. Getting rid of the separated levels, the ugly debug menus, and tweaking things like 3D audio. I’m pretty excited for that! See you next time! Thanks for reading!
