All right, welcome back everyone in this series videos, we're going to be working on putting together some skill acquisition blueprints. The idea being that our character can move throughout our test level, interact with some of these skill acquisition blueprints, and then thusly add to her bag of tricks, learning things like a double jump, how to shoot a fireball, how to transform into mist, etc. If you are wondering right now what you're seeing on screen and maybe saying yourself, hey, I don't have all that stuff yet What is going on? I have currently jumped on over to an older version of this project, one that I've created in preparation for this course, I just want to give you a quick primer here as to what we're going to be putting together so you know what to expect going forward. So I'm just gonna jump in and play here.

And you're gonna hear some background music and and all that kind of jazz, right. So the idea here is that we're going to create some of these pedestal looking things and when we interact with them, we're going to learn various skill. So I've got one for learning, a double jump. We've got one for a back dash, those are going to have similar looking pedestals that you can interact with right. Then we've got some for some, like white magic skills. This one's gonna be for learning in an ability called the Lens of Truth, allowing you to see hidden platforms and see through walls, that kind of thing.

This one's gonna be white magic skill for transforming into mist. See, see what that whole pedestal is gonna look like. And we've got some black magic skills that we're going to acquire. This first one is going to be shooting out a fireball. And then this last one is going to be an ability called electro Spark. It's going to be kind of like an area of effect sort of attack.

So all these pedestals that we're interacting with back here, these are some skill acquisition blueprints Though we're going to be working on building in this series of videos. So to start us out here, we need to import some assets. And in order for me to do that properly, I need to exit out of this project and open up the one that we are currently working on. So I'm going to pause the video here, and I'll pick it right back up when I have the other project loaded that we're all working on see in a bit. Okay, we are back in the project that we were working in, and I am currently in my content Metroidvania audio folder and I'm here for a specific reason. attached to this lesson.

In the course outline, you should find a whole bunch of assets that you can download that you're supposed to import into the Content Browser during this video. The first asset that's included, along with this video is one called SF x skill acquired. So I'm going to jump to my folder right now that has this asset. There's my s effects. Feel acquired. And all I need to do to bring this into my content browser is left click drag, and when you see that plus button, you can just release and that'll import it into the appropriate folder.

And then I'm going to jump on over to my Metroidvania textures folder because I got a whole bunch of textures I need to import in here. And I'm just going to hold down the Ctrl key and scroll wheel back a little bit just to minimize, or I guess, make these icons a little bit smaller. And all the rest of these assets here are all going to be textures that I'm going to import. So I'm going to select right here, and I'm going to hold down the shift key so that I select all the ones in between when I select the last guy, so I just selected right there, hold down Shift key, select the last one. Now I've grabbed them all. And I'm going to left click and drag these guys down into the Content Browser once I see that little plus button by my mouse cursor Now when these do import in and it will take a little while here, you will notice that some of them will have that sort of ugly looking background, not this sort of nice checkerboard background.

Know that we can get rid of that and I'll show you how to get rid of that in just a moment here, cuz that does drive a lot of people nuts including myself. So I'm just gonna give this some time here to finish downloading. While we are waiting for this to download, just wanted to point out some things about these different icons that we're importing. We've got some button icons, we've got some icons here like this nice electro spark and fireballs. Well these are going to be some icons that we see in our interactive menus that we're creating a little bit later on. And then we've got icons that sort of look like this that are going to be projected onto our pedestals that we're about to create those skill interact pedestals and then I've got some images in here that are meant to show when we do collect some of these skills as to what that skill is gonna look like as a sort of a tutorial, if you will, a little pop up tutorial when they do acquire that skill.

Okay, you can see in the background here that these different textures have finished importing. So I'm just going to minimize this folder. And again, you're gonna see some of these ugly looking backgrounds. If you want to get rid of those ugly backgrounds, all you need to do is on all you need to do is click on each one of them right, you do need to click on each one, double click and just change your texture group here to be a UI. And then when you save that out, and exit, you'll see that you have that nice checkerboard background. This black circle in the back is intentional.

So some of those that you do see with a black circle and back that is intentional. I'll work on getting rid of those backgrounds for the rest of these between videos, but I want to get rolling with some of the other aspects I need to take care of in this video as well. What's I need to do is I need to create some decal materials. And there are a few icons that I want to create decal materials out of. One of them is the decal back dash, where is that guy decal back dash is this T icon, back dash right there. So what I'm going to do with this T icon back dashes, I'm going to right click on it, and I'm going to choose to create a material and it's going to create a material in this folder, which I will eventually move to a separate folder.

But here I'm going to create it and there is that material. I'm just going to rename this really quickly to decal underscore, back, dash. And then I'm going to double click on this guy to open them up. And what I want to do inside of here is alter a few things. I'm going to change this a preview image from being a sphere to a flat cube like that gonna look a little bit nicer for our purposes. And what I am going to do is with our decal back dashes giant master material nodes selected over in the Details panel, I'm going to change our material domain to be deferred decal material using diverted the BA, that's fine.

Sure. And then blendable. I'm going to change this to be translucent, like so. And then what I want to do is I want to unplug this from our base color. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key and left click and I'm going to bring in a multiply node. So I can do this by holding down the M key m as in Mary and left clicking.

And I'm going to plug this into the A into the B if I select this multiple ply note, I'm going to set the B value for this to be 0.5. And instead of the base color, I'm going to plug this into the emissive color. And then I'm going to take out of here and plug this into opacity. And what you're going to end up with is it's kind of hard to see in the viewport there, but you should see something that looks like that. And if you can't see it, just kind of hold down, left click and tumble around it. That is what you should be seeing.

So this image right here, we're going to project onto one of our pedestals our our skill interactive pedestal for our back dash. Okay, so with that done, let's go ahead and save this. And I'm going to click on my master and the test map, tab there. And I actually want to duplicate this back dash a few times because I need to do this for our double Jump in our electrical spark and our fireball and our Lens of Truth and our myths. So, I'm gonna hit I'm going to select our decal back dash and I'm going to Ctrl W to create a duplicate of it Ctrl W, sorry, I'm going to let me just rename this really quick. I'm going to call this decal, underscore double jump, hit Enter.

And with that selected, I'm going to hit Ctrl W. to duplicate it. This one I'm going to call decal. electro Spark, hit enter. With that selected, I'm going to do Ctrl w again, this one I'm going to call decal. fireball with that already selected, highlighted in yellow, this will be Ctrl w again to duplicate it. This one will called decal Lens of Truth that's gonna be the name of an ability that we can get.

And then I'm going to do controlled W one more time and this one's going to be called decal. Missed, like so. Okay, before I modify the rest of these, I'm going to select all six of these, you can do that by either Ctrl clicking on all of them like that, or you could select one, hold down the shift key, and select that last one to select all in between and I'm going to move these on over to my materials folder right away. So left click and drag over your Metroidvania materials folder. And when you do, it's going to ask you do you want to copy them here or move here, select move here. Okay, now I'm gonna jump on over to my materials folder.

And I already have taken care of my decal backlash. So let's do a double jump next. Okay, the only thing we need to change out here is the Texture Sample. The rest of this is all going to be fine. So if I click on our Texture Sample mode, I can do a search for t underscore icon and I'll find the double Joe Right away, and you can see it's actually right down below it. So I'm going to select that.

Save that out that's going to be pretty good. Then after this is finished saving, I'm going to come back to my main editor here, you can click that square icon again if you want to see that and sometimes these are really tricky to see. Let's go electro Spark. Next, I'm going to select that Texture Sample mode and in the Details panel, I'm looking forward t icon electro Spark. Let's save that guy. Next I am going to select my decal fireball, double click on that select my Texture Sample node.

Let's change that to to the T icon fireball and I did name these all very specifically you'll notice I have different assets named fireball that we just imported. But for these these decals, I'm looking for the T icon version of them So these icons are different from the ones that are going to appear in our, our interactive menus. Okay, so that one's looking pretty good. And then I'm going to come to decal Lens of Truth select that Texture Sample, t icon Lens of Truth, that's the one that that ability is going to allow us to see hidden passageways or see hidden platforms. That'll be kind of cool. And then next is going to come over and under decal missed selecting this Texture Sample and we're looking for t icon.

Missed. There we go. Now the last thing that I'm going to want to do here is I'm going to come back to my content browser here and I'm going to change these thumbnail images a little bit. The way I can do that is if I come under my view options here in the Content Browser, I can go into thumbnail Edit Mode, I'm going to check that on. And you can see that there's a little message here saying that we are in thumbnail Edit Mode. And I'm going to change the preview asset for all these to be on the square.

And then you can actually move these around a little bit in the viewer to tumble it around. It's not an exact art, but you kind of get the point. I like seeing this a little bit better than these rounded spherical shapes, helps me kind of visualize what that's going to look like. And there we go. When we're done editing, we can click here. Let's save all.

And as I mentioned before, between videos here, I'm going to double click on all these various textures and I'm going to clean up the background. So that looks a little bit nicer when I get rid of some of this, this jank Enos it's kind of seen in the background of some of these With that, guys that is going to do it all for this one. We will see you in the next video.