Log 07: Summoning and Not-Quite-Riding a Mount

The first thing I did this week is finish up working on the UI graphics I did last week. That is to say I went through the tedious process of editing screen shots to make 2D images of the rendered 3D meshes.

I know it doesn't look all that different, but functionally it is very different. Now the menus will actually be there every time I re-open the project.

But that was at most, half a night of work. The rest of the week consisted on creating a rideable mount for the characters. One thing that is common in the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors franchises, but less so in the Warriors games of other IPs, is the ability to summon and ride a horse. This is important as a common accessory in many Sentai series is a powered up personal vehicle. This is generally a motorcycle, a steel horse if you will (thank you Bon Jovi). Puns aside, the mounts are important in the Warriors games as they provide a much faster means of traversing the generally large maps much quicker than just running and they are something I miss while playing the branch games. Also, while it won't be something in my game, I find the ability to customize your mount and use interesting animals other than horses in the later games offers a fun bit of customization to a rather straight forward game experience.

Before I got working on the mount, I had/have a choice I should make: motorcycles or horses? Let me explain: because I've decided to use Synty products for my 3D assets I'm limited to what they have made. Early on because of the way I had to do morphing (a mechanic I have not gotten to in Unreal yet, and may have to rework) I wound up going with a medieval/fantasy theme for my Sentai theme, which would make horses the obvious mount choice, thus I bought a bunch of fantasy asset packs in addition to some others. You would think this would still make the choice easy, but unfortunately it doesn't because horse animations are hard to do well and thus expensive and the ones I bought for Unity won't translate to Unreal. I'm a decent animator, but I don't have confidence in my ability to animate a horse well, which means needing to buy a new, expensive, animation pack.

This leads me to the other option: motorcycles are really easy to animate, but would require new asset packs and re-working everything (story, theme, etc).

So what did I decide? I decided to kick the decision down the line as I still have plenty mechanically to work on before this becomes necessary and will give me adequate time to save and/or plan for it.

What I did do is use a motorcycle model that I had as a stand in and just put off animations.

With all that out of the way I can explain how the mechanic works. Summoning the mount is one of five actions the player can take that uses their Power, the cost of which is very low to allow the player to summon their mount at almost any time. While dismissing their mount refunds a small amount of Power. When they summon the mount the player character is already mounted, and they can't get off it without dismissing the mount. This is done to simplify other controls and mechanics. While on the mount, in addition to moving faster, the character can attack with different albeit shorter less damaging attack strings, jump, dodge, even utilize a charging style Ultimate attack. The reason the player wouldn't want to be on the mount at all times is the character is harder to position, and they don't have as diverse/interesting attacks, nor do they have access to their character's Special ability or unique Ultimate attack.

The week was spent figuring out how to get the mount to spawn in and have the character mounted on it. After a day, I got out of my own way and found a couple of tutorials, so actually spawning in the actor and socketing the character to it was easy. The hard part, and what took up the entirety of my weekend was figuring out how to adapt my weapon summon/dismiss particle systems to work for the mount. You'd think it would be plug and play, but nothing worked. I had to finagle materials and change some properties. At first the dissolve material wasn't working so I had to fix that, then the particles either weren't spawning or when they spawned they were invisible. Eventually I got everything figured out and fixed, the upside of which is that it works better for the weapons than it did before.

Next week is going to be about doing some auxiliary mechanics to the mount summoning, like working the UI and Power costs.