Adventure: The Pyramid
Pyramids and Portals
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Where scraps had me ambitiously attempting to create my own procedurally generated cityscapes, Adventure got me unintentionally ambitious in a different way. It wasn't a requirement that we make our own models and textures, and if anything the attempt to do so more or less backfired on me here, but in the level sculpting phase I simply wanted a certain canyon look and decided to attempt to make it myself rather than attempt to find marketplace assets. That's a bit of a common theme for me, I really don't like using assets created by third parties if I can help it. It feels messy to not come in on the ground floor of something, something not tailored for one's precise needs. Then too I suppose I'm using a third party game engine so I can hardly complain. Still, while not quite seamless and perhaps a bit unpolished I appreciate that the assets here were a little more tailored to my needs, not that I would necessarily want to repeat my mistake here going forward as it cost me a bit of time. It's hard to say if it was "worth it" or not.
In any event, on the mechanical side of things I unfortunately couldn't get the portals working the way I wanted. I mean, they do teleport the player from the outside of the pyramid to the inside of the pyramid undoubtedly. That said, I wasn't really going for magical portals, but rather I had hoped for a more or less seamless transition between the pyramid's exterior to the interior but I couldn't quite figure out the camera angles. Maybe it's something that only really works from a first person perspective the way I was doing it, but without going back to experiment further it's difficult to say. I was a bit happier with how the mirrors turned out. It wasn't perfect but I was satisfied with the way even the basic cylinder meshes really gave the visual impression of rays of light using that sort of translucent emissive material. The triggers were a bit annoying and wanted to be quite finicky and I had some difficulties with the end of the beam sticking slightly outside of the target mirrors but all in all I wasn't completely dissatisfied. What really irked me were the difficulties with the mirror rotation. It was my first time working with possessing pawns in unreal and too late to really do much about it I realized that changing the screen resolution actually changed some annoying things like how far the mirrors could rotate and the distances the character could jump vertically, maybe also horizontally. On top of which my computer was crying trying to keep up with the project. All in all an irksome project but one I was ultimately satisfied with more or less.