A Look Into the Tech

During the classes leading up to this games development, our class discussed post processing effects. Because of this, I used quite a bit of post processing in the project. The camera has increased lens flare and film grain, and allows the functionality of zoom using FOV. These were all familiar to me, so I went down a new avenue and learned about Unreal Engines cinematic camera and its manual focus settings.

To replicate a real camera's feel, I added an auto focus function that would change the focus of the camera to whatever the player was looking at. This happens autonomously, so the player doesn't have to worry about finicking with the focus during critical moments. The focus is also purely aesthetic, and does not currently affect the photo scoring system. 

As a last minute addition--I added the functionality to use the mouse clicks to skip through the dialogue sequences. During testing, the dialogue sequences would become frustrating to wait through the duration of the text. If it frustrated me, it would certainly frustrate players.

This game was my first time making a physics object interaction system. Given that I was in a low loop, I was more concerned with creating something that is mostly functional, rather than something perfect and game ready. Because of this, I looked into implementing the most basic physics system utilizing Unreal's built-in Physics Handle component.

This component tends to clip into the floor, so I had to enabled CCD (continuous collision detection) for the object that the player grabs. This still isn't perfect and will clip into the floor, but will do it less often and was very quick to add into the blueprint. I looked into better ways to do this that would work better in a finished product, but for now this was the best decision.