How can a humble chip possibly defeat a seagull though? 🤺

Here's a question that I'm still working out an answer for: If my primary character is a potato chip, and his enemies are legion and attacking from the skies, how do I make combat between them feel even remotely achievable? This is David vs a flock of flying Goliaths. It's like the greatest underdog story ever told right? But here's the thing. The only underdog stories you ever hear are the ones when the little guy actually wins. Can he?

Mr Potato Body needed an ally he could lean on. Back in an earlier post I hinted at a blue bird with a soft spot for our little heroes. I mentioned that he likes to hang out at a bachelor pad that's over the edge of the cliff at Overhang Headland. And I pointed out that chips can't swim. The idea is that Blue Bird is a way for the player potato to go beast mode and take the fight to the seagulls rather than wait for one of them to pluck you from the ground. But 'activating' this awesome weapon has to be immensely difficult and risky, hence first proving yourself as a survivor and warrior to even get to the top of the hill, and then taking a massive leap of faith and risk going soggy.

Chips live for the greater good. The sacrifice is worth it.

This week I worked on a character controller that would allow the chips to ride on the wings of Blue Bird. It was hard! Trying to keep up with rotations in 3 dimensions is not easy- especially when you're working across two distinct coordinate systems (world space, where up is towards the sky, and local space, where up is perpendicular to the bird's back and forwards is whichever way the beak is pointing). It's buggy and broken but it's well on its way to workable for the moment. It's also a great step towards getting the seagulls implemented as well. I started with the Blue Bird because it will be controlled by the player, the seagulls I hope to be computer controlled. Baby steps, right?

One of the best things about picking Unreal Engine is getting to script behaviour visually in a tool called Blueprint. Programming can be hard. But even debugging those pesky rotational issues can be pleasant when the 'code' for it looks this pretty right?

As accessible as game development has become in 2022, it's still a massive pain in the neck making everything work the way you expect it to. Here's some screenshots of the bit handling those rotations.

This really shouldn't be that hard. But something fishy is going on, because I disabled roll rotations and this bird didn't listen.

That's it for this week. I'll leave you with a horrifying close up of Blue's prototype.

Yours potatofully,

Luke