Linear Movement Prototype
( Music used: MoGura -【フリーBGM】Irreversible_World )
This video showcases the movement prototype for PROJECT STYX at the Day 3 point in-engine development.
One of the things I said that I wanted when I was first writing up the Design Document for this project was that I wanted the core gameplay to feature a linear movement style similar to Sonic and The Secret Rings and Sonic and the Black Knight. Which means, before we could work on any gameplay feature, we had to get this movement system made first. Luckily, it’s not my first rodeo using Unreal Engine for game development, so I was able to draw up some diagrams on how to get the movement system working.
It was one thing to get the player’s movement bound to a spline, but it was another to make it still feel very natural and giving the player enough control in a third-person forward view similar to the modern Sonic games. One of the biggest issues I’ve come across working on this was player collision with other objects. Another would be to get the player’s origin to match the position and angle of the spline while maintaining proper influence from gravity. I’d once before made a proof-of-concept prototype in another engine featuring custom gravity mechanics the same way that Gravity Rush did, as well as allowing the player to walk on arbitrary surfaces. So the knowledge I gained from that helped me here. It will likely continue to help me further as I get the player to run on walls in the near future.
I should also mention that there was one guy that helped me with reaching a solution for the vector math in letting a player get shoved to the side by slanted walls when running into them. His name is Cole Ditzler, I met him in a Discord server voice chat. I can say it’s always good and helpful to run ideas by others to see if they might have an input on it. You never know when help is just a word away!
I also had a friend who’s also working with me on this project play around in the editor with what I had, so that he could pick up on some bugs and point out some errors while testing out the movement system in a level that he’s building. Remember, when making a game, always playtest! And if possible, get a friend who can play what you’ve built who can also describe well enough his thoughts and be able to articulate what might potentially be offputting. This also serves as a good way to get my friend used to the workflow and working within Unreal Engine, since he had prior experience with Unity before.
One major issue that this current version of the movement is that it doesn’t leave much room for obstructing the center of the path, as the obfuscation could send the player glitching about. The reason is that there are two line traces coming from the center of the spline area that shoots outward to see the objects the player could run into. It pulls the player closer to the center when they collide with an object with an angle that can just shove the player aside. I will have to modify the way player collision works in order to alleviate that issue.
