Physics Game Devlog

Week 1:

I took this week to brainstorm ideas. I thought about using throwing physics? I managed to think about a dodgeball game, but a local multiplayer. Whoever hits the other person three times with the ball loses. I found these tutorials:

https://youtu.be/6aAQ5ttikgs?si=rM6fWgmNypm7VDdj 

https://youtu.be/T7EZH0KlChI?si=ZNs7mjyvRnuD_xKp 

In the middle of the week, I gave up on this idea. I was brainstorming with Tiffany over a snack break and I got the idea of a rage room. Just break as many things using the chaos physics under a timer. 

Week 2:

I started trying to look for tutorials and it seemed to be even harder to look for them. I wanted the rage room to be in first person, meaning the character would need a weapon in their hand, and it was really hard to look for stuff. I usually like using tutorials as templates for my games, and it was a bit hard this time around to look for Unreal tutorials. We learned about keeping a point system in class which could’ve been useful for my game, but every other aspect was still unanswered for me so I ultimately gave up on this idea as well.

I ended up finding a tutorial on how to make your first game in Unreal, and I decided to follow that! Here it is, https://youtu.be/Npsf8_uQ59Y?si=KMBfcilO3Uj3BcyO . It was a platformer, so the game used gravity, jump physics, and some obstacles have launch velocity, so it was perfect. I decided to just use this game as an opportunity to learn more about Unreal and how to make a full game in it, as I only really knew bits and pieces.

Week 3:

I took this week to implement gameplay, and put the game together. Using premade assets was a huge help, though I’m a little bit disappointed I couldn’t find the time to make my own assets. Even though the tutorial was only 2 hours, it took me a course of a few days to finish everything, and that’s with cutting stuff out from the tutorial. I ran into quite a few problems, and I needed to allot time for my other projects. I decided to retarget animations using a different model from the default Quinn/Manny. In the tutorial they added a jump and blendspace for walking and running. For me, the jump wasn’t working, so I decided to duplicate the existing animation blueprint and swapped out the mesh for my custom mesh. He was now able to jump but he was walking and hopping on only one foot … The issue was that there was some type of control rig node in the animation blueprint that was causing it, and I had to get rid of it. Another big issue was there’s a moving obstacle where it can hit the character off the platform if the character gets in the way. However, the obstacle was going right through the character. After some troubleshooting, I noticed that the mesh was moving, but the collision itself wasn’t. This took forever to figure out.

Week 4:

Just finishing up UI and making sure all the buttons work. Then packaging the game to make sure it works on itch, yay!