Implementing the Medium Storm Elemental

 Author: Christopher Solomon


    During this week the primary focus and bulk of my work was devoted to the implementation of the Medium Storm Elemental. The Medium Storm Elemental has many similarities to the previously implemented Medium Water Elemental. Both are enemy types who's main focus is on attacking and destroying towers but the ways in which they preform these rolls differ. While the Medium Water Elemental shot projectiles at the towers, this new elemental that I was implementing instead creates a 'storm cloud' object that will damage its assigned tower for as long as it exists. Along with creating this storm cloud object, I also had to implement the new model and animations that we obtained from the Unreal Marketplace. 


    One of the first problems that I encountered this week was related to the Medium Storm Elemental's hurt animation. Although I set the montage to play in the blueprint, it would not play at all in game. After doing some research, I was able to figure out that I needed to add an animation slot in the animation blueprint to get it working. After following this step, the hurt animation worked perfectly. A major issue that I found early on in my implementation was a crash that would occur when the Medium Storm Elemental was spawned by the spawn manager. I was able to use the error information that Unreal gave me to figure out that one of the colliders was being loaded incorrectly in the construction script. After adding all of them into the collider array, the game no longer crashed. the last notable issue I encountered this week involved the storm cloud object. After testing it out in game, I realized that a single tower could be attacked by more than a single storm cloud, which was unintended behavior. I added a boolean value to the blueprint for towers, and afterwards I made sure that the Medium Storm Elemental checked this value to make sure it only attacked towers that weren't being targeted. 


Introducing: The Medium Storm Elemental!


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