Midterm Update

For this update, I created a game based around the concept of a "Spark" a representation of an idea or concept that one wishes to use to create.
The additions and things I worked on operate around the concept of carrying these sparks "through life" or through a course that requires the player to traverse carefully and throughtfully.

Sparks

These are the main components of the game. I made these using the "Item" interface, and added functionality beyond that. When picked up, the Player will slowly lose health over time using a Timeline system. This represents the 'mental drain' of maintaining the spark, the focus and drive it depleats to work on these ideas over time through the creative process. When "Used" the player can increase the intensity of the spark. The intensity will cause the drain effect on the player to become stronger, as well as affects the visual effects of the Spark itself to become more intense by interacting directly with the values in a Niagara Emitter system via a Curve setup. The higher the intensity, the stronger the emitters up to a cap, and down to a minimum. If the Spark's intensity reaches 0, it is destroyed.

Spark Holders / Spark Holder Managers

Spark holders are placements that you can drop Sparks of the corresponding color into. It helps you store a spark making it less likely to roll away. In addition, when you find another Spark Holder of the same time, it can communicate through the Spark Holder Manager of the related color, in order to teleport your spark to that Spark Holder. This is done by tracking all the Spark Holders in the level through a Spark Holder Manager, "Requesting" the Spark from the Spark Holder you triggered from from the Manager, which then iterates through all the related Spark Holders until it finds one holding the Spark, and then directing the Spark Holders to teleport the Spark to the correct Spark Holder for you. This will not work if the Spark isn't in any Spark Holders.

Spark "Rain" Area

Spark Rain Areas are areas that will slowly drain Spark intensity over time. It does not matter if you are holding onto the spark or not, over time it will slowly be drained. When multiple areas overlap, the effect will happen for each overlapping area, giving a nice "darker storm" effect that's more intense.

Additional Modifications:

Player Health

The Player has health now, and when it reaches 0 the game quits. The main way the Player's health drains is while carrying a Spark. In addition, "Using" a Spark to inrcrease intensity also deals additional damage. Falling off the map into a killzone will respawn the player to their last checkpoint while also depleating a large portion of health.

Dialogue System

The dialogue system was modified so that it will now add text from different sources to a "Dialogue Queue" and then will wait for the player controller's input on when to cycle to the next dialogue, automatically closing the box when all dialogue in the queue is depleated, and resetting it for new dialogue. This allows me to have multiple more ways for Dialogue to be queued to the player, while still allowing them to read and cycle through it at their own pace.

This is a quick summary and rundown of the systems I worked on and put into place for this game.
Here is a link to my github for the project as well.
https://github.com/HiddenRealm165/Coding1Project