Now that I have collected the animations I will be using in this project, I have begun working on creating a character controller. The third-person character controller that is created when making a game level in Unreal does come with a default movement set-up, but I wanted to create this from scratch. I created an animation blueprint and made a locomotion state machine that allows me to move from idling to running, as well as the ability to jump and crouch. All of these states are programmed to only flow in one direction, using keyboard button prompts to function. Both the jump and crouch functions required me to create three states, a beginning, middle and end, but in terms of programming, they were quite different. The jumping function requires a very quick response time so it doesn’t feel sluggish, so needed a lot of modification, but only triggers once on a button press. The crouch, by contrast, needs to be held down to remain crouched. I created this system in Unreal that allows the player to hold down the crouch button, and on release, the player will stand back up. The jump by contrast will end automatically on landing. This state machine is the foundational basis of the game character.
