Now that I had implemented the building blocks for a basic level, the next biggest thing that was bugging me was the camera. It was fixed on the character at all times, which meant if she went to any of the borders of the level you could see off the edge of the world. Definitely not ideal. In terms of the logic and pseudo code, I knew what I wanted to happen and how I thought it should be set up, but the challenge came in figuring out what terms Blueprint wanted me to use. After a bunch of googling, I finally found the answer: "clamped" values. By feeding the position of the character to the camera, but clamping the values if they went beyond the borders of the map, I was able to make the camera behave how I wanted it to:
There are other, more fancy things I would like to do with it, but for basic functionality that will do for now.
I pivoted to work on the star collection mechanic. I decided that the way the player would go from level to level was to pass through a star gate star door. There would be a number of stars in the world, but you wouldn't need to collect all of them in order to go to the next level, just a minimum of 5. I decided the progress bar might not be the best way to represent this concept in the HUD, so I changed the visuals to better match with the mechanics. I also added in some mist to help add to the mood and provide more interesting depth cues:
More to come!