Dracula B Stage

 

This week I created a full run-of-show system using a Level Sequencer cutscene integrated directly into gameplay. I organized the entire flow so that when the player reaches a specific checkpoint, guiding animations appear to show where to go, the music transitions, and the player is led into the cutscene. Once the player arrives, the sequence plays automatically, and afterwards new music is cued, and a custom post-processing shader is applied. This setup ties gameplay and cinematics together smoothly and makes the experience feel more intentional and polished.

next week I will work on optimizing the scene

perforce proof

Dracula C stage

This week I built a fully interactive and optimized candle-walking system that combines PCG with a custom shader. I created a spline-based tool that uses PCG to automatically spawn candles along a path, each with its own PCG-generated flame instance. Every flame uses custom instance data so the shader can individually calculate its behavior. When the player approaches, each flame detects the player’s position and smoothly moves toward them, then begins orbiting around the player in real time. The whole system is performant, procedural, and fully shader-driven, allowing large numbers of dynamic candle flames to react interactively to gameplay.

Protomeshing - 'D' Stage

For this assignment, I created a post-processing shader that reacts to whether the main character checks over their shoulder to see if Dracula is behind them. The system works by using Blueprint logic that calculates the dot product between the camera’s forward vector and the player’s orientation vector. This determines if the player is looking forward or backward. Based on that result, a timer gradually tightens and squeezes the post-processing effect, making the view feel more tense and claustrophobic as you avoid looking back. Once the player finally turns around to look behind, the effect smoothly disappears.

State Machines

The Process:

Creating n IK rig for the Mixamo character

So we can use a retargeter to export our necesary animations to our Mixamo character

Then create a Blend Space with our exported idle, jog, sprint animations

Then inside an animation blue pritn create a state machine

Then in the new scene under world setting select Animation_GameMode

Then set default paw class to our Pete BP

then select ABP_Pet in our Charcter BP inside our mesh

now we hsoudl atleast ee idle

int he Aniamtion blue print 

adding velocity seteting speed value to aniamtion run

Continue to do some more setup.

Then came implementing falling animations from not jumping and just falling of an edge.

and then to make in air animation happen

and now, we get the falling animation happening not only from just a jump but from falling off an edge! 

 

Carousel Generator Part2

 Making the upper Roof Base

So, we first have the project organized all into one file.

So, we should always do get latest on the content folder...

waht if we ahd a caresoul isnide of ancaresoul isndie of a caersoul and ...

Carousel Generator

Here we have 2 for loops, one to create horizontal rings, and another to duplicate the rings.

How can we make the lights on the inside column curve.

Our first step will be to make the start of the for loop, (the bottom) start slightly larger, and the end (the top) of the for loop to finish slightly smaller.

In our for loop, we have the current ring we are on and divide it by the total amount of rings to get a 0 to 1 value that we can use.

We can then lerp with the 0 to 1 value between the original radius and a 1.3 times larger version of that radius.

That gives us this growing in radius rings as we go higher in ring position column.

But we want it to be big at the bottom, then skinny at the middle, and then biggest at the top.

To begin this, we actually just add a simple exponent to the alpha in lerp. We don't have to think about the math too hard because the highest number will be 1. 1 to the power of say something like 50 will still be 1. Therefore, this will cause our change to not be linear anymore...

And then look we get the curve!

We can now adjust the exponent value to change where the curve happens

And then we can try to create the roof of the carousel by making the final goal radius to be larger.

Let's add some mirror tiles!

We already have the data for the lights, so we can just re use that logic but with a smaller radius.

Now to rotate them we can create a vector form the tile position to its respective light and rotate them to that vector!

Now time to lerp the scale.

let's see what size we need to make them at the bottom

Almost there...

Ok time for the top values

Almost there...

There we are!

Now let's just set these as our lerp values for scale and use a slightly different power function with 5 instead of 9.