New Project Beginnings !

Now that university is finished, I have decided to keep myself busy and start creating more mini projects, to both expand my skill set and improve my portfolio !

For the first project, I am aiming to create a time trial based rope swing game, focusing on high speed and Spiderman-like swinging physics. I have also partially planned a bigger project that revolves around creating a star-wars based render/short. However, I only plan to start making this once this first project is completed.

For this game, I began by simply wanting to mess around in UE5 and create a Spiderman style swinging mechanic, as I have never approached this before. However after working on it for the past couple of days, I want to push it further and develop a fully fledged final product.

One of the cool things I plan on including is the option of either VR or desktop play. This is due to the fact that there only seem to be one prominent spiderman VR game, which is only a short demo, and I wanted to see what the process would be like for developing such a game.

As of writing, I have just finished a very primitive checkpoint system. This times the player while they pass through all of the avaliable checkpoint gates, and gives a final time at the end. The ability to duplicate this across multiple levels is very simple, as a majority of the code is being performed in a tracker object that checks for the number of gates in the level, as well as the current gate the player must pass through.

For the swinging code, I actually finalized the bulk of it while on a train back from my brothers wedding, a nice way to destress after meeting with the family ! I showed him a very simple version of the gameplay while at his house the night before the big day, to which he gave points that he liked as well as aspects he felt should be included.

The swinging code stays the same in both the VR and Desktop pawns, as they share the same movement preset. However, the firing of the grapple is a little different due to the difference in gameplay styles. In the desktop version, the players aim is centralised to their camera, hence aiming whever the player is currently looking. In the VR mode however, the players controllers are used to aim, and both can be fired at the same time. This can allow for a smoother swinging process if the player so wishes.

Also, I added in a boost feature which activates when the player lets go of a swing. A more powerful version of this can be performed if the players presses the jump button while swinging, or grabs and pulls down the swinging hand while in VR