Pwew. This game sure is starting to feel like the 'Never Ending Story'...
Last month was mostly spent working on the five puzzles you see below (no spoilers :-) ).
Let's just say a lot of layers were involved (background, object inside cabinet, closed door, open door, lock, object on top of cabinet, plus a bunch of hotspots for sprites and flipbooks) ... Also activating / deactivating objects was fairly complex. But everything seems to be working now ... So : yeay !
Working with flipbooks turned out to be a bit of a headache.
You assemble the flipbook using a sort of a timeline with numbers going from 0 to
however many sprites you are using in your movie (minus 1). You can set the duration of each
individual sprite if you want to do so. For instance, in this flipbook, I have the general speed of the flipbook
set to 2 FPS. As you can see below, I have some sprites with a 'frame run' of 1, and some sprites with a
'frame run' of 2 (meaning they will be on screen twice as long as the others ones).
In a blueprint, when you want to access a certain sprite in a flipbook, you can use 'SetPlaybackPositionInFrames', which conveniently (NOT !) starts from 1 instead of 0, and requires you to take into account frames with a 'frame run' that is not 1. Inconvenient & very easy to make mistakes ...
The other thing I did last month, was finalize the inventory look & inner workings.
I also redesigned the inventory icons and detail views. Everything works, but I'm not entirely happy with the
way the detail views look.
I switched from a light, opaque background to a transparent, dark background, and
not everything looks as good as it did before ... Also because of the 'funky' way UE4 deals with a mix of
opaque and translucent sprites. My advice : if you can avoid translucent sprites, then do so !
On my TODO list I still have the following items : final puzzle design, sound, testing, testing, and some more testing. Hopefully the game will be finished by the end of the year. Time to start something new !