Honours Project Development: Main Menu Overhaul and Teleport

Main Menu overhaul

I decided to change look and feel of Main Menu and for that purpose I took public domain pictures from book about visualisation of thoughts and emotions ‘Thought-Forms’ (A. Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, 1901).

First, I created about 1-minute long animation sequence where pictures from the book are floating on the screen. Then I created Theme Music. Because the game itself start with synthesized sounds I decided to keep this style and do electronic ambient music for the Main Menu. After that I used the same pictures to use them as UI buttons. Also, font has changed to something that in my opinion looks better than boring Arial-like default Roboto font in UE4. Then another step was addition of sounds when player click the buttons. Here I did rather unusual thing for UI in games and instead of single sound for all buttons or button I created a pool of 7 randomly selected sounds that is assigned to all the buttons. So, every time player clicks the button, different sound will play. The reasoning behind this is the result of my research about synaesthesia and colours: every synaesthete see different colours related to the sound. I wanted to visualize this.

I’ve had to do a lot of small changed in a code and Widget Blueprints ‘behind the scene’ so everything is opening and closing as it should. For example, now screen and sound fade out when player start the game. Same for Instructions Window which is fading in when player click the button. Pause Menu was also changed but it’s not finished yet (visually). Additional ‘Back to Main Menu’ button was added. Every button got a Delay 0.1ms long node after FMOD Play event because otherwise the sound was played after function was triggered which adds a lot of delay especially for changes in graphics settings. Now sound is triggered instantly after player click the button. Now player is welcomed with a text every time the new level is opened.

Level covers:

Now each room have an additional Plane Object which is black and cover what player could see in each room which normally could be used as a hint to see what is in each level before crossing the doors. Now player is obligated to cross the doors because the cover becomes invisible when player gets close enough. Thanks to that solution I don’t need to add visual clues to every side empty room. It saves time and resources. Teleport to another level:

Vortex Particle Effect was created by me (as a result of failed attempt to create different kind of Particle Effect) which is available at the end of the level. Player have to go through it and at the end of the vortex player is teleported to another level. I’ll create a sound effect for it later today.

Today I got two ideas how to utilize resources of each level. First one is to teleport player to unused rooms and make multiple fake levels in single level to utilize more rooms than just a few from the map. Second is to simply remove unused rooms from the map. I’ll try both to see which one makes levels load faster