Hello everyone! Jeff "Jaskell" Haskell back again. For this dev diary, I'd like to talk about creating the puzzles that are part of the new Meatlump theme park coming in Chapter 10.
In the past, some of the collectables as well as quest objects only required the player to click on an object to receive an update, so for Chapter 10 I wanted to try to switch things up a little by associating a simple puzzle with a few collection objects. Instead of just finding and clicking these objects, the player will initiate a custom UI that will require a certain amount of interaction to "win."
One particular puzzle/collection I would like to highlight for this diary is the Meatlump Bomb Defusing UI, as I think it is one of the more complex systems added in Chapter 10. In the beginning it started out with what would seem like a simple set of tasks. The puzzle design had the player cutting wires as the bomb timer was counting down. Unfortunately, no UI existed that would support wire cutting, so this gave me the excuse to learn the SWG UI builder to add a new UI that would. This turned out to be a significant challenge.
After a few days of tweaking and coding, the custom user interface eventually started doing what I needed it to do.
While I was busy pulling my hair out with the UI builder, our fantastic art team provided a nice new Meatlump Explosive asset for the puzzle.
Once things were in game for testing we realized a few details didn't make sense. For one, it made sense that the bomb would explode if the player failed to defuse it, and it would then cease to exist well, at least for a while.
This presented a few problems as there was no working system for spawning and respawning anything but creatures and NPCs. A special object spawner had to be added so that any player destruction wouldn't be permanent.
I hope to extend the destruction and respawn functionality to other parts of the game in the future. It would be kinda neat to have a few destructible objects in a room that react to laser fire. Exploding barrels anyone?
Thanks for reading this diary, and I hope you enjoy the Meatlump theme park in Chapter 10.
Jeff "Jaskell" Haskell Associate Designer, Star Wars Galaxies
