Physics Game Post-Mortem

This game is the one I had the most difficulty with starting and the one I’m probably least satisfied with. It was really hard to stick with an idea since I decided to work with Unreal Engine for this game. I don’t really have much experience in making games in Unreal Engine and I only knew bits and pieces. The only game I’ve ever really made is a Maze Chase game, but I didn’t really handle a lot of the blueprints so I was still very unfamiliar with them. Like I’ve mentioned before for my other games, I usually find tutorials and base my game off that, but it was really hard to find tutorials for specific things—mostly for specific blueprint things. Or not really that it was hard, but I would need to follow multiple long tutorials to get what I wanted and I wasn’t sure if I had the time for that. 

I had a lot of ideas, at first I thought of a local multiplayer dodgeball, but then I would need to find and watch tutorials about timers, hit system, animations, and so many more. It was mainly the camera settings and animations that threw me off of these first few ideas. I thought of a rage room after dodgeball, but I didn’t know how I could implement first person animations with a weapon in hand, and have that weapon register for hits on items. It was a disaster. 

I found an Unreal Engine platformer tutorial that was 2 hours long and it went over a lot of the basic things that you need in a game. Things like a timer, coin pickups, tracking the coin pickups, obstacles. Even though the tutorial was only 2 hours long, I had a few issues and it definitely took longer than just two hours…I didn’t follow the tutorial strictly to a T since I wanted this to be a learning opportunity, not just mindlessly copying and following instructions, but that lead to issues needing to be troubleshooted. I talk about it more in the devlog but, basically moving obstacles not affecting the player, player animation being janky, etc. 

This was also the only game where I didn’t make any of the art, which was a little bit sad. I think I spent too much time brainstorming, and finding resources and tutorials, I just couldn’t find the time to model a character, props, make animations, the whole shabang. The assets I’ve chosen however I think are still cute and are cohesive. They all follow a pastel, low-poly, cute look. 

While it was unsatisfying being able to bring my ideas to life, I’m glad that I decided to focus on using this assignment as an opportunity to learn more about Unreal, and how to make a full game in Unreal. I’m grateful to still learn a lot from this project. It made me realize repetition and practice really is what makes me understand things better.  Hopefully I can implement what I learned in this project in the future, and hopefully bring my previous ideas to life.