2024/10/20: Penny's Skills, Enhanced Crouching, and Gameplay Adjustments

Penny's Stats for Recruitment Screen

Today, I worked on finalizing Penny's stats and abilities to better align her with the game's narrative and mechanics. I added her stats to the character recruitment screen, giving a more polished look to the Agent Bio. Penny now has abilities like Enhanced Reload, Efficient Scavenger, and Steady Aim, which add depth to her role, making her more adaptable in a survival scenario. Her skills, such as Agile Movements and Adaptability, fit well with her CIA background, showcasing her versatility and utility during missions.

Crouching Mechanic Improvement

I encountered an issue with the crouching mechanic where the character wasn’t crouching as intended. After some investigation, I adjusted settings to ensure the character is set up properly for crouching. This tweak helped fix the problem with the Enhanced Input system, allowing the character to crouch and uncrouch smoothly during gameplay. Ensuring these animations and transitions worked well was crucial for both gameplay feel and immersion.

Blueprint for Loading Screen Issue

I revisited the blueprint logic for showing the loading screen. Initially, I faced an issue with the game instance casting, which led to the loading screen failing to appear properly when a level was being loaded. I ended up reviewing various solutions and found that the cast failed due to incorrect instance reference. Fixing this required ensuring that the correct game instance was accessed, allowing for smooth level transitions.

Level Transition with Loading Screen

To add a loading screen when moving between levels, I decided to utilize the widget approach while keeping in mind that heavy loading might freeze the UI. I tested a few methods to animate the throbber during level load and ensured the loading widget appears before any level change is initiated.

Krigz AI Behavior - Roaming Update Lastly, I refined the roaming behavior for Krigz AI. Now, Krigz selects random spots in the point of interest (POI) where the player has been spotted most often. If the player hasn’t been seen in any POIs, Krigz moves to the POI where it spent the most time. This approach gives Krigz a more calculated roaming pattern, creating tension for the player by always being on the lookout for their most recent activity. Additionally, I decided to reset the "Time Spent" counters for each POI at the end of every day/night cycle, ensuring that Krigz doesn’t get stuck looking for the player in the same spot for too long.