Puddles... and tons of improvements to everything

Puddles really make a huge difference to how the city in the first level looks! I finally opted for picking some materials that already had a puddle layer, so that I could just use vertex painting to draw puddles. Some meshes had to be tesselated more - just 4 corners wasn't enough to make good looking small puddles in most cases - but other than that, it was really quick and easy to add this beautiful effect.

Tons of fixes were made for the AI. It's still not perfect, but a lot of accidentally omitted functionality and handling of corner cases was fixed. It's not fairly decent for the sneaking puzzle I added in level 2.

Level 1 is essentially a chase through a small part of a city. Level 2 is a sneaking puzzle followed by meeting Alex in person - your helper whom you're in contact with via radio already from level 1, and stay in touch with after you leave him. Alex gives you the famous gun that'll be used in the rest of the game, and let's you practice first one some practice targets -then real enemies. Level 3 is the warehouse level, where you begin your attack on the enemy headquarters, via a route going through the warehouse first.

Level 2 was a fun and varied level to implement. Unfortunately, the blueprint language in unreal wasn't as powerful as I wanted for some of the things I wanted to create - or it's just me who hasn't yet found out about some key features... implementing Alex, the NPC character, was great fun, and so was adding keys, locked doors, adding sound effects to the doors - different depending on door type (metal or wood). Alex was the most tricky one, but I eventually opted for the unstructured custom approach for writing AI - not behavior trees as I had used for the enemies. This is because the NPC is more scripted than actually exhibiting that much dynamic behavior, adapting to situations.

Implementing a dynamite was also a nice part of level2. The explosion code ended up duplicated for the player and the enemy characters, illustrating a need for refactoring and rethinking some interface design in coming iterations.