Endless Runner Tutorial Completed
I recently got some help regarding the endless runner that I was previously working on. The problem was that I wasn't actually supposed to place the character or the first floor tile into the level. The other problem was that I was supposed to navigate through some menus and set the game mode to the mode which was created for the endless runner. After doing this all of the problems that I had were solved.
I continued working through the videos, learning how to do more things, especially since I experimented with some things introduced in the video this time. Through experimentation, I was able to get an idea of what everything did. There were no major problems for the rest of the tutorial series up until the end, where for some reason I wasn't able to get the corners to kill the player upon running into them. This was a minor problem, since I could have made it kill the player in the same way that the obstacles killed the player.
One simple variation that I did was to make the corners appear more often. Instead of needing 7 straight floor tiles before a guaranteed turn, I made it so that there were 2 straight tiles then a chance for a turn. Since it only heads about 7 tiles ahead, 2 tiles was the minimum that I could make it go forward so that it wouldn't loop back in on itself. This gave more variety since turns weren't guaranteed at specific intervals, but could happen fairly often without causing problems.
Another variation was that I caused the player to speed up as time progresses. This had the outcome of increasing the difficulty the longer the player had survived for. I knew that it would get too hard too quickly if the player had a constant acceleration and would continuously speed up. To ensure that the difficulty curve felt nicer, I set the player's speed to a multiple of the square root of the time passed. This had the effect of the player speeding up quickly initially, starting very slow so the player can get their bearings and dodge the first obstacle. The player would continue speeding up, but would speed up more slowly as time progresses, remaining at a playable speed for longer.
I decided to test myself by using Blueprints to make a function so that the colour of light shining on the coins (half rings in my case) would change. I was able to get it to change between colours over time as well as make the colours differ depending on where they spawned. I preferred the colours based on their position so that is what I ultimately did.
There were some bugs with the game. If the floor would go downwards and the player would go below a certain height, the player would simply disappear. The same thing would happen if the player was moving fast enough. I have no idea why this happened. When the half rings were picked up, they would play a sound forever if I used a sound. If I instead used a cue, it would stop after playing once (as was intended), however it would completely stop playing any sound for further pickups once I had collected 16 of them. Based off the comments, I was not the only one with this problem.
I intend to use what I have learned while creating this to make a fairly different endless runner. The original concept was outlined in the previous post. I will modify this plan and explain my new plans in a future post.