Links

GitHub (coming soon)
Download:

Engine

Unreal Engine 4

Project Type

Personal project

Duration

3 months

Team Size

2 people

Curent status

On hold (due to school)

Awards

Overview

After creating a handful of 2D games, I wanted to make something in 3D which was focused enough in scope to finish. As such, I elected to make a game focused on making movement feel fast, fluid and natural.

The game itself has a limited number of mechanics and extremely simple level art (as neither myself nor anyone in my immediate circle are 3D artists), however, this allowed my development time to be focused on making the gameplay as polished as possible.

I have completed work on the following areas:

• Player movement abilities: Dashing, slamming, double jumping
• Movement feel tweaking: Jump height, speed, air control, jumping shortly after leaving platform, screen shake and vibration on landing, graphical effects on dashing, sound effects
• Respawning and related systems: playing effects on dying by falling out of level, respawn management
• Level design tools: Route builder, developer stats, debug fly mode
• Menu and level management: main menu, pause menu, loading screens, level streaming

For movement, I elected to add a dash ability similar to Deadcore. To help the movement feel snappy, I added a feature so that if you dash from platform to platform, you won’t overshoot the platform. Additionally, I elected to add a ‘slam’ ability similar to that in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. This allowed movement to be even faster since the player no longer has to wait to fall after a big jump.

After many iterations of tweaking movement values, I added screen shake and sound effects to help sell the movement and make it feel crisp. The movement still has some room for improvement but I have learned a lot through the work done.

A first for one of my game dev projects, I built a few development tools, the most prominent being the ‘route builder’. For grey boxing levels, this allows you to place platforms on the level and have real-time feedback on approximately how difficult the platform will be to land on. This way you can get a ballpark estimate on where to place a platform without having to jump in and measure it using the character.

I worked on the project part time for approximately three months while on co-op before putting the project aside to focus on school. I will return to working on my game once school slows down a bit.