My destructible and its super awesome explosions!

Soem causual fun with my destructable progress

Now tell me this doesn't look super fun.

ISO map

My isometric map for my collaboration with Tim Callahan for our racing level .

Car UVing progress

The UV grid makes it look super silly like a cubic cow.

New stunts and Map. Also storyboards

I am going to partner up with Tim (http://callforhan.blogspot.com) for our level concept "Fort Mexizona"

So i redid stunts and a new map to fit in and to make my storyboards. 

Arrays pt 2

I had an interesting and frustrating experience with this array due to something either in Unreal or my programming not allowing me to create more than 24 rows in an array. I spent at least an hour making a text file that was 32x32, but when I went to output it, the array refused to create my last 8 rows. After no luck in fixing my issue, I decided to downsize to an array that I knew worked and try again another time. This array challenge was much easier to understand and comment out and much more versitile, I really liked it other than some overall confusion!.

Racing level concept ideas

"Reach for the skies and keep on reaching"

My first idea was something related to Nikolai Tesla but his most famous invention being the Tesla coil felt very limiting. Even if the concept of city in the sky is a a popular one, I want to use that as my concept, but implement things similar to Tesla coils.

 The main landscape of my level would be floating platforms in the clouds on some sort of hub area. The terrain of my level will be mostly metal and ceramic-looking panels. The time of day would be between evening and dusk, with a sort of color scheme like this:

The panels and detail lighting would be shades of light purple like this 

The whole floating platform is a self-sustaining ozone repair machine so many of the stunts would involving a dynamic map. Some of the magnetic panels are misaligned and many aspects are acting up, making traversing the platform difficult. As you complete laps, parts fall away such as the first bridge and you are forced to drive on the magnetic wall to the right of the bridge. Also new paths become aligned with the main path and shortcuts become available. Because of this, each lap is a different gameplay experience. 

One of the landmarks is a very large coil that you drive through off a jump and it boosts you foreword. Inspired by a Tesla Coil. 

Another landmark/event will be after the first lap, one section of panels will become unstable and wobbly. On the third lap, these panels will start moving laterally and must be navigated or you will fall off the level. 

The intensity of the level will increase as the main path panels vanish and are replaced by stunts. A large theme of the level is electricity and magnets, so the visual stylings will reflect this as much as possible. The panels would be very smooth and fluid. One of the main inspirations is cloud city from Star Wars: 

The panels will be slightly reminiscent of the interior of the interior of Cloud city's carbonite freezing room. 

There will be animated sequences of lights moving in the direction the player will be moving as well as signs. 

Additional terrain and features could include burst pipes and vapor shooting out. This could be another stunt involving propelling the player or forcibly diverting them. The magnetic panels would have a distinctive and memorable light pattern or configuration to show the player what is magnetic versus just plain ceramic/metal. 

Racing level stunt research.

As soon as I think of stunts, I think of jumps. BUT, in racing games, big jumps are totally weaksauce, so I thought to go more extreme and find something that I have never seen before in a game (at least the ones I have played).  I saw this video and I knew that I wanted to implement a portion of my level with some sort of stunt like this, even if an artificial force keeps you to the wall.


When looking into interesting mechanics in games that impact the track, whether it is helpful tot he player or actually hinders them, I immediately was reminded of Tick tock clock from Mario Kart DS and 8. Throughout the level, there are clock hands and gears that can act as shortcuts and death traps depending on how you approach them.

You can either go around the clock hands, or if you're daring, you can try to use them as a shortcut. each lap, they change position and become harder to use. In another part of the level, the clock hands are a path to death on the first 2 laps, but on the 3rd lap, they are a huge shortcut. 

A cool example of a level where the level is essentially attacking you and all other racers is Motorstorm Apocalypse "Bridge to nowhere" The cliffs are falling apart around you, making the racing surface uneven and ripe for ramming other racers to their doom by way of falling off the level or exploding against a wall. At one point in this playthrough, the light house falls and create a large obstacle in the middle of the road. 

I

Arrays!

     In programming, we are using blueprint in UE4, and we have been learning arrays. We made a light array that would turn a light on in a row of 12 and each would sequentially turn on as the last one turned off. We also added the option to have more than one on at the same time.

For convenience, I set the delay between each light activating to a public variable so i could change it on a per blueprint basis. I also went above the criteria of the assignment and implemented a public set of variables to change the RGB values of the lights. For fun and a little bit of randomness, I added a boolean onto the "set Light color" node that when it is true (When I tick the box labeled "Random?") in the blueprint details panel) it will make each light in the sequence a random float within the range of 0 to 1, which is the color range in Unreal 4.

After soem experiementing, I managed to figure out how I could change the offset of the lights in the details panel and with a few copies of my array blueprint, made a sweet arrow, which becomes even cooler when its color is set to random.

here is my array below.