[28/04/2019 edit: removed dead links to closed studio website]
Our studio supported the first Capcom Vancouver Game Jam and myself and the nine other participants could not be more proud of our results. The theme, elastic, was randomly selected after employees voted on ideas we had during a brainstorm. Elastic was a challenging theme that resulted in every team using Unreal's built-in physics to create gameplay. I had always abandoned physics for stricter position control via script, but learned a valuable lesson that I will apply to cameras in my next "Real Time Cameras in Unreal Editor 4" post.
Our studio supported the first Capcom Vancouver Game Jam and myself and the nine other participants could not be more proud of our results. The theme, elastic, was randomly selected after employees voted on ideas we had during a brainstorm. Elastic was a challenging theme that resulted in every team using Unreal's built-in physics to create gameplay. I had always abandoned physics for stricter position control via script, but learned a valuable lesson that I will apply to cameras in my next "Real Time Cameras in Unreal Editor 4" post.
 | My team created Hugline Miami: a top-down, non-violent shooter where the player shoots hearts of different colours at party-goers to match them in couples. My goal was to design & implement the metagame systems & gameplay resulting from joining any two party-goers. |
I fought against the common video game trope of shooting party-goers, then making them disappear once they join, and spawning more party-goers, because disappearing often implies violence. Most other games have enemies instead of party-goers and these games train players to interpret removing enemies from the screen as killing them, which was counter to the intention for Hugline Miami. In this case, implementing a spin between the two party-goers took the majority of the production time, and I abandoned the other metagame plans in favour of this feature because I felt so strongly about not allowing party-goers to disappear.
My first approach was to re-parent the colliding party-goers to a new object, which I dubbed the Huggs Boson. I found a simple actor as a parent would not join them*, and eventually discovered an issue on the UE4 forums** that prevents physics constraints from being a viable solution, either, although they seemed ideal. Next, I tried deleting the original party-goers on collision with each other, spawning two dummy actors connected by a physics constraint and rotated by a Timeline, and then swapping in the party-goers again but this led to a spawning bug I could not resolve. Oliver, one of our engineering interns, found a pure physics solution while helping me investigate this problem late Saturday night. It turned out that applying velocity on each party-goer at a slight angle off the vector towards each other allowed us to achieve a better effect and eliminated the need for timelines or object deletion.
The moral of this story is that physics can provide simple solutions, and should be considered instead of Timelines whenever the latter requires collision management or deleting existing objects. More on how this applies to cameras later!
Links:
*https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/316122/bug-attachtoactor-weld-simulated-bodies-at-runtime.html
**https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/160479/blueprint-set-constrained-components-failing.html
My first approach was to re-parent the colliding party-goers to a new object, which I dubbed the Huggs Boson. I found a simple actor as a parent would not join them*, and eventually discovered an issue on the UE4 forums** that prevents physics constraints from being a viable solution, either, although they seemed ideal. Next, I tried deleting the original party-goers on collision with each other, spawning two dummy actors connected by a physics constraint and rotated by a Timeline, and then swapping in the party-goers again but this led to a spawning bug I could not resolve. Oliver, one of our engineering interns, found a pure physics solution while helping me investigate this problem late Saturday night. It turned out that applying velocity on each party-goer at a slight angle off the vector towards each other allowed us to achieve a better effect and eliminated the need for timelines or object deletion.
The moral of this story is that physics can provide simple solutions, and should be considered instead of Timelines whenever the latter requires collision management or deleting existing objects. More on how this applies to cameras later!
Links:
*https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/316122/bug-attachtoactor-weld-simulated-bodies-at-runtime.html
**https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/160479/blueprint-set-constrained-components-failing.html
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