Creating an Experience and Playtesting

I missed last week's devlog. I didn't feel like I had enough to post, but I probably should have talked about the challenges I faced and what I got done. I want to make a game like Soccer Physics, but in 3D. I love the chaotic nature of the game but I also like that there is some skill to it. I want to try and capture that charm. Fully remaking a version of that game would require making a fully rigged character from scratch, and I don't have time for that for an assignment so for now I'm sticking with the base Unreal third person character. Last week I focused on creating kick mechanics for the player to kick the soccer ball. Was mostly simple enough.The way my physics worked also allowed for intuitive dribbling when just running into the ball. To add a chaotic nature to the game, I wanted to add collision between the ball in the player in which if the ball was going fast enough, it would hit the character mesh and make the player ragdoll. This was really tricky. I wanted to keep the capsule component for easy dribbling and collision, but wanted to switch to the mesh for realistic physics collisions. My solution ended up using the balls current velocity to determine which player component it would be colliding with. It still needs some adjustments but it works really well. The main problem is I'm using the event tick to check every frame, and casting to both components from the ball blueprint to switch from one to the other. I'm not sure what my solution is, hopefully I can find another way other than casting, maybe with interfaces or something like that. This week, I focused on creating a little game utilizing these mechanic. It was a guantlet that involved dribbling through cones, shooting the ball to knock down targets, and avoiding a bunch of projectiles (which utilizes some of the collision implemented with the soccer ball) to score a goal. I didn't have time to polish it up very much, so the start, win screen, etc is pretty rough, but I wanted a game to turn in.

After a little playtesting, I got some of the chaos that I was hoping to get through the physics and ragdoll. The gauntlet I set up however isn't conducive to getting everything I want from my game, which I knew beforehand. There still may be kinks in the ragdoll and collision physics, which I'll have to continually optimize.

Github Link

Note, I haven't uploaded a newer version of the project in a while, so the one there is old.