Stefan Claasse

One of my main tasks during this project was to work on the telekinesis ability of the player character. The goal of this ability was to pick up certain objects and have them float by your side, so that you could throw them at a later time.

To do this, i made use of a linetrace to see if the center of the screen would hit an object that was able to be used. If this was the case, the object would get a rotation component and lerp towards the player.

To keep the object next to the player, i made use of spline points on the player character, where it would lerp towards to if the player would move to either the left or the right side. The objects also have a slight delay to give that additionaly 'floaty' feeling.

When throwing the object, the object would first move to the center of the screen before having a velocity applied to it in the direction the player looks. This allows physics to work with the object and will result in walls being able to be destroyed.

Later during development, I was tasked with adding a way to pick up multiple crystal shards that could be used to fight against the corrupted flower. Since these shards were rather small, the telekinesis mechanic would be difficult to use here.

To combat this, I made the gravity pull mechanic. When used, the mechanic would check the actors in a radius around the player to see if there were any telekinesis objects around. If this was the case, they would move towards the player and follow the spline as mentioned above.

Since players sometimes dont hit the corrupted flowers, I also decided to expand the spline points in the player to allow them to hold up to 3 crystal shards. This would allow the player to have more tries when getting the corrupted flowers and wouldn't have to Continiously use the gravity pull mechanic.

To prevent the telekinesis mechanic from being obsolete due to the gravity pull. The gravity pull was intentionally made short range, while the telekinesis mechanic can be used to pull objects from afar.

During development of this game, I also made a spawning platform system where the player is able to spawn a platform infront of where they are looking. However, later during development, this mechanic was scrapped from the game and thus can not be used.

This mechanic would work by spawning a platform when a button had been pressed. Once pressed, the platform would spawn infront of the player at a certain distance and the UI would show one icon less. When 3 platforms had been placed in the world, the player could reset his count by walking on the ground again. When a 4th platform would be spawned, the first spawned platform would instead despawn. Allowing the player to reach greater heights.

To create the damaged holes in the platforms, the scalar of the dynamic material instance would be changed using a timeline. This resulted in an animation that looks like the platform is being summoned.