Good evening, hope everyone is having a great jam so far! Today I was able to finish some initial setup for my game and I figured I would share a little more of my progress. Some of this may seem over-explanatory, but I am having fun okay.
The first thing I did was create a class to serve as the base for all of my interactable objects. Directly in that base class I setup a "look at" function that will trigger a highlight whenever the player is looking at something they can interact with. This should happen inherently for every interactable.
After that, I went about creating a class for both doors and drawers, as these will be necessary for the game. They both work relatively the same and are setup with a variable that changes the mesh on construct, and an array to hold actors which will get parented on begin play (such as drawer contents or fridge door contents) meaning I shouldn't need to make any custom actors for these interactions. If needed, I can also add in callback triggers which will activate other like-minded actors (such as for double doors).
Once I had that setup I made a test UI that shows the value of all the objects collected by the player, and the interactable class that allows you to collect valuables. As the story of the game suggests, you are in the house looking for money and valuables so I wanted to get all of this simple stuff nailed down first. I realized almost right away that simply storing a reference to the actors wouldn't work if I wanted to destroy the actor references, so I made a data/structure setup to allow for easily dropping valuables in the scene, giving them an included name, and all their variables autofill. This way I can store an array of names and cycle through to add up the total value.
Finally, I have always wanted to setup a TV that turns on and off, and this will be important for my game as well so I figured I would do that now. Turns out it's actually super easy in UE4, so that took about 20 minutes including searching for a free white noise clip with sound that I can use commercially. I also went a step farther and got a clip of a TV being turned off, with sound. I am very excited with how it turned out!
I know I said finally, but I also made an openable toilet. Because why not.
Next week I will be getting started on the AI, and if all goes to plan, by the middle of the week I will be posting another devlog with progress on that. If you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read my devlog. I look forward to reading yours!