Wipeout Devlog

As stated prior in the post-Mortem, I chose to do it in an unreal engine because of how straightforward it is to use, and it already does a good job at incorporating physics based mechanics in the base game template. Also, in Unreal, I had a lot of options for what kind of physics based game I could do, whether it’s a first person shooter, platformer, sports, etc., so it  not only made sense to use the engine.

I started off with the original unreal simple mannequin body and applied the rag-doll physics in its details panel, I then added a control input that triggers it to rag-doll if the key is pressed. While the input worked, the camera still moved after the physics what’s applied, so I had to add a trigger in the blueprint for the camera to only stay on the character.

After I got that working, I imported my obstacle meshes and created a blueprint for each of them, I applied a trigger that causes the player mannequins body to rag-doll if it’s touched.

I also added a trigger box volume for if you fall off the stage, the rag-doll function is triggered.

I then created a checkpoint flag  and gave it a blueprint that triggers the player to re-spawn to the nearest checkpoint after he rag-dolls. Unfortunately the re-spawn was not working, every time it re-spawned, it was just the camera that spawned in the place where the character should have been, so i had to recreate a re-spawn function, which worked, but instead of re spawning at the last checkpoint it restarts from the beginning of the stage, which I don’t really think it is a problem because the stage is not too long. So every time you fall off the stage a fail prompt appears and you have the option to either restart or quit.

After the checkpoint system was made, the next feature I looked to add was a timer that tracks how long it took to complete the course, overall the process straightforward and I was able to get it working.

After everything was set up, I then created my stage, was pretty simple and, play testing it , I did get a bit of a challenge from it, I do have to make some scaling adjustments to certain platforms just because some platforms were too large which made them easy, and some were too small, which made them near impossible to get through.

After adding some materials to the platforms, I created a title screen widget, which did not take long, then I packaged the game to upload. The game is now out on Itch.io, and I hope everyone enjoys it.