Wonderland Mechanic

The idea behind this mechanic is to give the player the feeling that they are growing/shrinking. This seemed unlikely to accomplish literally in kismet alone so I decided to fake it and instead to change the size of all the actors in the scene rather than the player pawn.

First, I tried to use level streaming to get this effect. I created one level that was big and another that was smaller in scale and then used a trigger to stream them back and fourth. This however, did not give the aesthetic I was looking for, but it's still a good thing to know how to do.

I created a few simple levels with boxes of various sizes. Then I added them to my level manager, making the smallest of the boxes my persistent level.

This is what the kismet looks like:

But since that didn't quite work for me I moved on to playing around with InterpActors.

I figured out that there is a track in Matinee called Draw Scale 3D under New Vector Property track. After that it was really easy to change the size of all the InterpActors in my scene. I also had to move them using a movement track to make up for the difference in space after they grew.

So this is what my kismet ended up looking like: (The toggle hidden is for the 'drink me' bottle after it is used)

This method gave me the subtle change of size over time that I wanted originally and I'm pretty happy with the results.

I've run into an issue when shrinking the level. I haven't determined why yet but the actors don't seem to want to move to the point where they touch the player. That does seem like something undesirable except I was sort of thinking about having it be like the walls are closing in and the player gets crushed if there is no escape. I will experiment with this further, it seems like a fun idea.

Also, I wanted the player to be able to climb up the table and get on top of it via the kez 1 way wall mechanic but I can't get it to work for some reason. Another thing to look into further....

****It's been discovered (thank you mike) that there is a ChangeSize console command. So basically all you have to do is place triggers and use the console command node in kismet (ChangeSize [F]) to change the player size. What a simple solution to what I've been trying to do! It works but is not as aesthetically pleasing as the matinee method that I used previously because it is instant, not gradual, size change.