Here is the post before the New Year is upon us. What I am showcasing here is the work on the 1.4 Update to Project R which will be released into the New Year, but for now, here is what will be coming:

With me learning more about Blender and animating the VFX, I have decided to try and make one more move using the Sword Slash asset made from last week. This idea was from a Concept Drawing I made from the Energy and Darkness post. Both depictions showed the stick figure holding a spinning sphere with a big cyclone spinning around it, and it was either Green for Energy or it was Purple and Black for Darkness. Well, I finally have the start of a working model for it:

For now, I named it Purple Vortex since it is a spinning ball with a cyclone around it and it is Purple. This was created by taking the Sword Slash Asset before it was cut and shortened down and simply adding a Sphere Object to the center of it. The Sword Slash Asset is that cyclone, with a chunk of it removed to mimic the movement of a blade slash. After adding the two elements together in a collection and coloring it Purple, I animated the key frames of this move by consistently rotating and translating the cyclone part. The ball really only needs to be translated onto the plane, but rotating it when adding the keyframes works too.

After that, I exported it as an FBX file and imported it into Project R by dragging and dropping. There were a lot of issues I ran into when importing the animation file, where the animation file was split into multiple Animation Sequences based on the number of keyframes added, and there were times where it wouldn’t import the Animation Sequence at all, but after trial and error, I finally got it into the game. I mapped it to the ‘V’ key:

The color has not been added, but that will be fixed when I adjust the materials for the two parts of it. The final step is to finally make it damage the Enemy. For that, an AnimNotifyState was added to both parts of the Purple Vortex during the Animation Sequence duration, then I added two sockets to the ends of the cyclone. Finally in Blueprints, when the AnimNotifyState was triggered, the SphereTrace would try to look for Enemies being hit, and if they are hit, it deals damage from the Strength Stat of the Player. With this long explanation, I feel like I should show it in a full on YouTube tutorial (maybe that will come soon?).

Finally, after following all of these long steps, you have this:

The SphereTracing looks so cool when it spins around. That is the initial prototype for an ability like this. Now, there are some things I have yet to add:

• Give it a cooldown so that the Player won’t spam the ability.
• Give it an Icon on the Player UI so that they can see if its on cooldown or not.
• Give it color.

Otherwise, I am happy with this initial product and I cannot wait to have all of these things worked on and displayed on the next update in the New Year. I wanted to extend a Happy New Year to everyone, and I will see you all after the New Year.

Take care everyone!