We knew our teams for this unit by the end of February and had swiftly created a discord server so we could message each other and get to know who we were working with over the next seven weeks of this unit. After the briefing we had a voice call to discuss ideas and what potential game concept we can come up with, with some ideas noted in the figure below, we decided we wanted to make a cooking management game based on life, i.e, University life.
Since we knew what we was going to make, at the first production meeting of the unit, we came together and discussed what essentials we needed to create the game and what we could do extra. To make organizing easier, we created a Trello board to divide up tasks and to keep track of what needed to be completed. Each specialty of games has its board, for me, it would be the Development board. There we divided the tasks and started working on what we needed to complete.
I took responsibility of creating the fridge interact, win state, annoyance level, and the randomised fridge items. First I created the fridge which was the most important part of my contribution for this project. My goal was to make a working fridge that opens and closes as intended and produces random cookable items that are inside the fridge. I would also need to design the fridge to be able to pick up items and toss them into a cooking pot.
As a start to the project, I created a temporary fridge by flattening cubes and positioning them together, I used a sphere as a reference to the pivot to opening and closing the door.
I then created an input mapping from the project settings, which I named Interact, I used the Key E as the interact key. I then created an Interface and used enhanced input actions event that only when the button E is used will activate the interface.
I now had the interaction completed, but I wanted to make the door open with an added feature that the player must be near the fridge to open the door. Therefore, I created a boolean variable to let the program know if the player is near the fridge. This boolean is set to true if the player is within the collision box.
This is a timeline I used to allow the rotating animation of the door to happen, I made a timeline with a length of one second and made two keyframes at the start of the track and the end of the track. One keyframe has a value of zero while the other keyframe has a value of one. This means when the value is at zero the door rotation has not happened, however, as the timeline moves linear, the door also rotates in a linear motion. Once the value reaches one, that means the timeline has ended and the rotation value has reached it’s endpoint.
I noticed when I ran the blueprints, the door would open even ever I clicked the interact key, therefore as a next step to the fridge, I wanted to make sure the player was within a certain radius, using the collision box conponent, I checked for overlapping actors that uses the interact interface, this would only detect the fridge door, therefore allowing the code to call the interact event and open the door. With that, set, I would use the boolean to set whether the door is open or closed. If the ‘isClosed’ boolean was true, then the door would open, ‘else’ the door would reverse the animation and close.
