Took this video while testing out Juda's new dual blade spinning attack and I just had to post. It's so matrix-esque!

Pretty much immediately after posting that last special ability, I realized I forgot to animate Juda's luma (his antennae thing on his head). So here is the adjusted animation:

Added a cool new ability for when Juda attacks with his throwing knives far below him!

​What if wings could be knives? And what if those knives could be thrown? And instead of you going to pick up the knife like a boring little dude you front flipped quickly as if the knife was pulling you to itself? These are the questions we must ask ourselves in game development...

This was my first attempt at a projectile-based ability. It had to be constructed quite differently because I had to add two wings as static meshes as opposed to having the wings be a part of Juda's skeletal mesh. At any rate, I am extremely happy with it. The movement is super satisfying and fun. This ability will be fairly late game as it negates a lot of other forms of travel and will make early platforming puzzles fairly trivial (although it will add a whole bunch of complexity for future platforming).

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I am closing in on completing all of Juda's abilities that I have planned. Here's what is left:

- cleanup sword and shield animations and redo the backend code (it is a little messy and unreliable)
- add a special spin attack to the dual blades ability
- add a boomerang ability

Once I have all of these abilities done, I am going to start building an environment specifically for a well-polished demo complete with a nice environment, puzzles, and enemies. Then I will be asking for some playtesters to give me feedback on how everything fits together. So look forward to that! My beginning goal was to create a decent demo in sixth months. So far everything I have built in Juda has taken four months (including a lot of basic UI, and backend systems that will make things smooth going forward). I think it will be difficult but possible to get a nice demo done in my original timeline.

​My wife and I are also moving across the country at the end of this month, so that will take a chunk of time away from development as well. Anyway, I am not going to rush anything, but I am anxious to get a working playable thing for people to start giving me better feedback on. We shall see what happens!

Did you know Juda can throw bombs while gliding?! Better watch out below!

​Essentially there are two different BP actors here: one for the spawner (the plant) and one for the bomb itself. The bomb itself is composed of two static meshes, the bomb and the fuse. I use a timeline to animate the fuse after by simply lerping its relative location and rotation into the bomb so it looks like the fuse is getting shorter. I also attach a particle system to a socket on the tip of the fuse for the sparks. After the timeline of the fuse is over, I use a timeline to lerp a linear color and the scale of the bomb so it gets redder and larger. Then, I spawn a particle system at the actor location and do a collision sphere check to see if any actors that can be damaged (implement a can be damaged blueprint interface) are within the blast radius. If they are, I use that same blueprint interface to send a damage message to each one. Then, I just implement the bomb with my player carry system so whenever the player picks it up, the bomb starts its fuse!

Additionally, as you can see in the video, the bombs themselves can be damaged, and when they are damaged they accelerate the bomb to the next state. I.e. an inactive bomb will start its fuse, an active bomb will start to explode, an exploding bomb will immediately explode. Because the bombs implement the can be damaged blueprint interface, they also can be hit by player projectiles and player attacks to start their fuse.
This is from a game I am solo developing called Juda. If you have any questions or just like what you see, I would be honored to have you join my discord or following me on twitter. Thanks for reading!
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/rekystudios
Discord: https://discord.gg/r6PK3Cv