Inspirations and cut scenes

When developing this project I think of where I am drawing inspirations from for it, in this case it’s from things such as wipe-out and other racing games, a fast pace gamed environment!

I think a very important thing in all types of games is music, but maybe even more so in this type of game, keeping the pace, keeping the player on their toes ready to react to anything the level can throw at them. To get the feeling of our theme everything needs to be right the environment, the music, and how the game presents itself to the player.

Wipe out is a fast pace racing game.

All of this moves me and the group in the direction of having a cut scene at the start of each level to slowly bring the camera down to the ball ready for launch, my idea for this is inspired by the start of games like Gran Turismo 4 where the players car is sitting on the grid as the camera pans in, with loud sounds player on each number of the countdown making the game feel epic and making the player ready to go. 

Locking Camera to the ball Kactor

Now that i had the camera facings the ball using a offsets, after reading in the coordinates of the ball the x y and z axis where subtracted or added to using kismet to create an offset for the camera to follow at.
The cameras angle became a problem using the rotation input on the “set actor location” i managed to get a good angle for the camera to look at the ball from a better angle making it easier for the player to see the ball and upcoming obstacle.

The ball rolling down the tunnel with the camera locked to it (Its very addictive, watching it roll down there!)

Phidgets control

The phidget is now working, the reason i had been having problems was to do with the config witch i had made copies of using visual studio insted of adding them as a link in and letting them stay in their default folder.
The other problem was the UC file was looking for the DLL but had the wrong file name, it had been looking for “UDKPhidget” when the file name was “UDKPhidgets” just missing an s and the whole system fell apart!

Getting back on schedule and some test levels

After being held back by problems with Visual studio works to get the accelerometer working have fallen behind. The error was saying that visual studio didn’t have the required registry access to create a new project, after trying multiple fixes with no success I decided it was down to the other scripting programs I had installed such as visual basic interfering. I then decided to format my laptop (it was long needed anyway) this has now fixed the problem and i am back on track to getting the accelerometer working in game!

During class time we looked at some possible level designs for this game and begun to look at attaching the game camera to the phidget ball actor will little success, but its early days with that and I don’t expect it to be easy.

As for the level design we talked about having the difficulty of the level be changed by how steep the tunnel the ball is falling down is, the steeper it is the fast the game play will go and therefore harder it will become.

I will post some level shots here soon.