YEAR 2 - BA2b - New Background and Dialogue Box

Most of the assets are in the game now and It's looking really nice. We were discussing whether to have something behind the UI so it didn't blend into the background too much and I trialed a few things. We figured that we'd risk blocking out too much of the background by putting a box behind it so it was decided we'd do something with the mountain.

I tried emulating a 2D UI box by placing one physical one in the level and it looked pretty cool but a bit out of place. In the end we decided just to have the mountain rise incredibly high so as to surround the UI.

Also, ever since implementing the day/night cycle the lighting on the house has been FAR to light during the night, but I'm happy to say I finally found a solution.

I placed trees going up the mountain very carefully so as to follow the very edge of the horizon. This was to give the game more character and to make the mountain feel less slapped on. It was important that the area just to the right of the house was left free because that's where the sun sets and I wanted players to see that. Suddenly it feels like the dolls are living in a fleshed out, breathing world.

I've been experimenting with a dialogue box that describes what dolls think of eachother or just generally giving more clarity to what's going on in the house.

Unfortunately the compression on this gif is very high but what's happening is, as the dolls are eating above a certain food level, the dialogue box is telling the player which doll is too full.

I would've extended this concept to more things in the game. It could've had it's own quirks and give hints when not much is happening. I couldn't get it to work how I wanted though. ALMOST but not quite so I've scrapped it for now until I figure out how to get it working how I want. (Basically if there was more than one thing to talk about at once it would always prioritize the earlier in the array first and I wanted it to choose a thing to talk about randomly) (I could swear my code should work in theory! But maybe there are still thing I don't know about how UE4 handles arrays).

This recorded this gif to show cannibalism since I didn't actually show it in my last post