Settings Menu, New Enemies, Equippables and Trailer Teasers

This sprint was one of my favorite times in the project so far. Being able to take advantage of Unreal Engine 5.4 scalability settings and the ease of creating a key binding system has been a lot of fun. Both of these I don't have a lot to talk about as the scalability settings are assigned to each item and the overall scalability is a feature that unreal has created. However what I can talk about is two of my favorite things, the sprout enemy and the molotov. The sprout enemy is a cluster of roots that are glowing with radioactivity. Whenever the player gets close to them they explode, alerting nearby runner enemies as well as slowing and disorientating the player. When making this I started with creating a niagra system that does two things. First spraying upwards a burst of sap particles that glow with radioactivity and fade overtime as they fall to the ground. It also needs a "puff" of debris and dust as this organic organism is blowing to pieces. This also helps hide the fact that there is no longer a model on the screen the player once saw. While creating this niagra effect was a lot of fun the coolest part of this system is the camera tricks I made to help sell the effect to the player. This camera trick is made up of two parts, a post process after-image material and a camera shake class. In order to make the after-image effect I needed to create a post process material that effects only the emissive channel. I started with a screen position node to get the pixel position. Then passing this through an add node to adjust the strength I took this value and passed it through a sine node to get two versions of the screen. After clamping this so everything isn't way blown out I pass the value through a multiply node to adjust the distance the after-image is from the original image. Then I added another multiply node with a parameter for intensity and finally added this back to the viewportUV from the screen position into a scene texture post process input node and finally passing the color into the emissive channel of the material. All this allows for an after-image effect to be seen on the players camera with variables to adjust the intensity over the duration of the explosion. Finally I created the camera shake class to pair with the after-image effect. This really was just creating a camera shake class as a child of camera shake and then adjusting the oscillation parameters and calling the camera shake function when the event triggers. However with the combination of all three of these vfx, after-image, and camera shake effects a very well sold explosion effect can take place and slow down the player whenever they get near a sprout. Finally I created a molotov item. The molotov is a craftable item than can be made with alcohol and a piece of cloth. When the player throws the molotov if they have matches in their inventory it will automatically light for them and then explode once it hits an object. This functionality was easy to create as the throwing is similar to the hand flare and the use of an item in the inventory is similar to reloading a weapon. However the coolest part is the niagra effect of the molotov. I started out experimenting with niagra fluids as they can achieve a very believable realistic fire effect. However these niagra fluids are very performance intensive and not realistic for a game. So instead I decided to make a combination of five different emitters to create the effect. First I send off a directional burst to get position data of the burst. Once I got a believable burst of alcohol exploding out of a glass bottle I created four more emitters for the different parts of a fire, flames, smoke, sparks and, heat distortion. All four of these emitters use an event handler to listen to the location data of the initial burst. Using this location event I am able to bind the location of each droplet of burning alcohol to my burst particle to create a more random effect. Finally to sell to the player the stickiness and danger of an exploding burning bottle of alcohol I added a collision effect to my location burst particle. With this collision I can change the forces and velocity to stop moving the particle once it collides with something. In turn creating a very believable exploding molotov effect that can be stuck to walls or even on some tree monsters.