Welcome to Gobo Rampage's eighth devlog!

Filling up the level
Vegetation was added with the material and foliage painter and trees/bushes were placed around the map. Especially the oasis, where nature is most prominent, got it's fair share of additions. Items and props were placed around the oasis, main streets and water alleyways to liven up them up and add more color to the distinct areas. An effort was also made to make sure the player is no longer able to leave the map without placing invisible walls.

Particles
Since most of our models are finished and available in game, we decided to move on to create particles for our characters. Niagara was needed to add particles to certain items, so we integrated the Niagara plugin in C++ and created the Niagara component. The particles that were implemented this week:

• Movement speed particle, giving that extra "boost" feeling when your score multiplier reaches higher stages.
  
• Sword slash particle.
  
• Hit particle, showing the player that the adventurer didn't miss and a life was lost.
  
• Stun particle, giving the player feedback on when exactly a character is immobile.
  
• Successful prank particle.
  

Start/Pause/End menu
It was time we worked on some menus so we set up a start/pause/end screenname based on our art bible and past designs. Since we had to show the high scores of our game, we decided to make it write and read data from a .txt file to an array. Once this worked, we began on the end screen. This also taught us how to work with variables through different levels. For the player name, we added another .txt file to our folder, this made it so the name would only have to be filled in once, even if the game closed.

UI
The health UI has been rendered fully and base colors have been added to other parts of the UI. We added the visualization of the annoyance bar, health loss and epic prank:

• The bar fills overtime and changes color when a new stage is reached.
• Hearts darken when the player gets damaged.
• The pearls on the prank item inventory turn green when the player can do an epic prank.

Landscape material
With the map nearing completion, I focused my efforts on adding one last texture to the landscape material. A rough rock texture, slightly darker than the rocks we already put in the scene, so we can paint the gaps in between geometry to make a more complete whole.

Vision radius
The vision radius of the guards was reworked. Using a mesh to visualize the radius proves inefficient at best and world breaking at worst. Using a 2d plane on a bumpy environment make for weird clipping. Because of this we replaced a geometry based vision circle with a decal. "Receive decal" was disabled on all static meshes and actors in the scene so the decal exclusively projects on the ground itself. The vision circle logic now directly deceives the absolute value of the guard vision radius. it now more accurately shows the radius.

Bridge
The last bsp in the scene was finally replaced with a bridge mesh. It was scaled and moved around until the navmesh accepted it.

Guard
We changed the guard a bit so he runs back to his original position after the player leaves his view-radius. We also visualized the view-radius and it gets bigger when the game gets to a higher stage. The player can't jump anymore when he is grabbed by the guard.

Adventurer
The adventurers run in groups when multiple are chasing the player. This made throwing items not that useful since it can only stun 1 adventurer at a time. We changed it so the surrounding adventurers to the hit adventurer get stunned too.

Fixes and additions
The throwables were not really accurate since it gets thrown to the position of the target, but some targets are moving constantly. This was especially noticeable for longer ranges. We changed it so the system takes the velocity of the throwable and the velocity of the target in account for longer ranges. The collision was an issue we had to fix. We had problems with collision when an enemy and player lightly touched. It would not register that they had collided. This is fixed now so collisions work better.
We also expanded to more types of villagers. For example: Blacksmith, laborer, wizard...

See you next week with another devlog!