Big Alice, Medium Alice, Small Alice.

This week I focused on blueprints in Unreal, one of the main parts about the Alice in Wonderland is that she grows and shrinks throughout the story. I tried to make the growing and shrinking into a mechanic in the game, for instance the player would come across a small hole and would need to become small to fit through.

To make the player character grow and shrink I set up three meshes of the character in the character blueprint at three sizes (big, medium, small) and made it so that only one of the three meshes would be visible at one time. As a test to begin with I assigned each size to a button press 1, 2 and 3. So pressing 1 would make Alice small, so the process would be:

Press 1 > Set medium and big mesh to invisible > Set small mesh to visible

However this had a problem, the collision mesh for the character did not change. As a result of this if you turned to small Alice you’d be floating in the air and if you turned into big Alice then you’d be walking through the floor.

To fix this I added another part of the blueprint which told the collision mesh of the character to change size with the different mesh. So if you were to press 3 to make Alice big the process was:

Press 3 > Set medium and small mesh to invisible > Set big mesh to visible > increase collision mesh

But surprise surprise there was still a problem with the blueprint. When you increase the collision mesh’s size it increases from the centre outward, so when you turn big from medium the collision mesh goes into the floor and so does the mesh still.

To fix this I needed to elevate the player before the change, the simplest way to do this is to get the character to jump when it increases size (this goes for changing from small to medium as well as medium to big).

 Press 3 > Jump > Set medium and small mesh to invisible > Set big mesh to visible > increase collision mesh

But then there were still problems. When I went from small to big the character wasn’t jumping high enough, and if I just increase the height of the jump when you press 3 then you’ll jump a ridiculous amount when you’re medium going to big.

To fix this I added variables which prevented the player from skipping a step between big and small, you always have to go medium before you go big. Next week I’m going to look into how to make the changes situational.

This week wasn’t all boring and blueprints, I made our blockout in engine (yey!) all with illustrated diagram to show what we are willing to cut if needs be.