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final outcome video

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parkour research

"The sport originally which has been termed Art du Deplacement,  Parkour or Freerunning, was founded in France in the 1980s.  The origin of the sport is widely attributed to a group of 9 who named themselves ‘Yamakasi’ – David Belle, Yann Hnautra, Chau Belle, Laurent Piemontesi, Sebastien Foucan, Guylain N’Guba Boyeke, Charles Perriere, Malik Diouf and Williams Belle – as well as their network of friends and training partners."

What is Parkour? - Parkour UK

i like the idea of parkour because it allows the player to move around difficult to traverse terrain.

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Sustainability

The Environmental Impacts of the Video Game Industry | Earth.Org

The TIGA Guide to Environmental Sustainability in Game Development - TIGA

Gaming Sustainability - Microsoft Game Dev | Microsoft Learn

How to Design Environmentally Sustainable Games (linkedin.com)

"What are some tips for designing environmentally sustainable games?

Choose green platforms

Optimize your code Incorporate sustainability themes

Collaborate with green organizations

Be the first to add your personal experience

Educate yourself and others

Be the first to add your personal experience

Here’s what else to consider"

above are a few thing to consider while trying to stay sustainable within game design.

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wider world research (rock climbing)

An overview and history of rock climbing - Rock climbing - factfile - GCSE Physical Education Revision - WJEC - BBC Bitesize

"Overview

Climbing has many different disciplines and can be categorised into four main areas:

mountain climbing

ice climbing

bouldering

rock climbing

Although these are all different activities, they have a common theme of utilising the sustained use of hands and legs to support the climber's balance and weight.

"Success in rock climbing is achieved by reaching a particular summit or the endpoint of a pre-defined route without falling. In professional rock climbing competitions, participants are tested on the speed they complete a climbing route in or by achieving the farthest point on an increasingly difficult route.

Although climbing is considered an extreme sport, it still requires all of the same physical attributes of mainstream sports. However, the different challenges, excitement and adrenaline rush are the factors that make it so popular.

For safety reasons, participants cannot commence climbing unless they have received training from a qualified trainer, have a good understanding of the correct climbing techniques and use the specialised climbing equipment necessary for the task."

I've looked at rock climbing because if I was to take my game idea further I would want to include wall climbing.

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Sunset Overdrive

movement mechanics:

rail grinding

mantling

dash/roll

bounce on objects around the map

electric wires as ziplines

wall run

I like these mechanics because they add a form of fun and flow to the game while keeping it at a similar pace to other zombie apocolypse games, I also feel that the mechanics help the player to traverse the world. all these mechanics suit the game well and I couldn't find anything about them that I didn't like. If I had more time I would like to implement some of these mechanics into my game.

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Spiderman PS4

in spider man for ps4 the player has access to a lot of unrealistic movement abilities this is fun to watch but isn't what I want to add to my game. this is because I'm going for a more realistic parkour game rather than being able to jump off buildings and "float" across large gaps.

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Titan fall 2 research

Fast paced character movement

double jump

sliding

wall running

slide hopping

grapple

speed boost/stim

with some extra time to work on my game I would have added wall running, sliding and double jump

by adding these mechanics it would speed the game up a lot which is what I want but wasn't able to achieve another thing that those mechanics add to a game is a level of flow which benefits parkour in first person games especially FPS games.

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Main menu Widget

Screenshot of widget design

Screenshots of button input - when you press a button it takes you to the games.

When you die it takes you back to start and reshows screen - blueprint.

Video

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Air Control

How did you set this up and why

I added stronger air control for the player because it makes the game more fluid and also more challenging to land on the platform while moving very quickly through the air

What is air control?

Air control is how much your player can move whilst in the air - this mainly happens when the z movement is below 0 or "Falling".

this video highlights the importance of tight movement in fast flowing games.

How did the air control effect your movement while in air.

air control affects my movement and also makes the game feel smoother because I have total control over the characters movement even while airborne

(Screenshots of settings)

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Ragdoll physics

To set this up I took the skeletal mesh for my player and added a physics body this gives unreal the collisions it needs in order to simulate physics.

in the code I made a custom event called ragdoll which when called will simulate physics on the skeletal mesh as well as enable collision.

When simulating physics we switch to a third person camera so that the player can watch the ragdoll fall.

After a short 4 second delay the level will restart.

Video of Ragdoll working:

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Switching over to a 3rd person character

The first thing I did was Import a model from mixamo I chose to use the alien soldier because it looks very futuristic which I really like the look of.

can see the body when looking down this is what I wanted to achieve with the first person character but the model didn't have a torso or legs, the 3rd person character has both of those missing aspects this is why I used 3rd person character instead of the first person model

arms would swing but not obscure the camera

movement felt more organic/human

this is a video of me playing my game showing that the characters mesh doesn't interfere with the field of view which would decrease the players range of view

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Initial exploration of using FP character. 

at first I was trying to make the characters arms more visible than they were because my game was supposed to be a first person parkour after I realized I didn't have time to follow my original idea of a samurai game. the main hope of moving the camera was to make the arms more visible but it didn't work with the first person character model therefore I switched to using the 3rd person character model instead, that worked a lot better because the 3rd person character doesn't stand facing an awkward direction that interrupted the cameras field of view

the collision and field of view problems were both caused by the shoulders on the 1st person character model, I tried hiding the actor and importing the 3rd person character model but it wasn't working in the game testing.

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Adding platforms into the environment

my main reason for adding platforms was to test parkour and to allow the player to get to an end goal. I mostly used the platforms as a way to travel throughout the map. the platforms are also used to help the player avoid touching a ragdoll pad which will force the player into a ragdoll state after 4 seconds of being in that state, the game will restart.

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Greyboxing

I was aiming to outline the layout of my game and also created the platforms to test out my animations/mechanics which would help me figure out what did and didn't work.

I used industrial textures because I was running out of time to finish my game, therefore I used some free to use already downloaded textures.

companies will use greyboxing as a way to outline the shape of a map/level in games. this is helpful because it is easy to move around and change without having to change a lot of other stuff.

Blocktober: Spider-Man's New York (80.lv)

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Adding terrain to Unreal

in UE5 go to the selection mode in the top left of the screen and change it to landscape mode rather than selection. once in that menu you can assign the terrain a material/texture that it will be rendered with once created in the game.

the landscape will become visible before creating it to show you an outline of how big it is. this is the landscape i created in testing i used a grass texture.

this is what the landscape looks like after i created it in the game. it has applied the texture that i chose i will not be using this landscape for my game only for testing purposes.

some of the landscaping tools that are available to use are sculpt, erase which reduces the height value causing a dip into the landscape another tool demonstrated here is flatten which is used to flatten a bumpy/curved landscape feature to be perfectly flat

(this is the landscape I'm using for my game)

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Parkour Game research

Cyberpunk

Already looked at Cyberpunk 2077 and Ghostrunner for combat: https://www.tumblr.com/wsc-fmp-tomo/745012058114949120/games-research-games-with-similar-combat?source=share

from my research these are the key elements that I found from the movement in Cyberpunk

Enhanced speed and jump - this is from the modifications you can do to the player in the game.

Dash - long distance dash - ideal for the player - closes the distance with use of a melee weapon.

use of motion blur to help show speed

Ghostrunner

The movement elements in ghost runner are

Wall run

Time Slow

Mid air dash (in time slow)

double jump

from my own experience playing the game the pace at which you move is something that's interesting to me in games. Ghostrunner is really fast paced.

Dying Light

some of the movement elements in dying light include

mantling

grappling

wall running

jumping off buildings

drop/jump kick attacks

i like these mechanics because they make the game able to be played at the players preferred level of intensity/speed this also makes the game more enjoyable if the player chooses to either explore the map or just to go on a zombie killing rampage.

Parkour Movement talk - GDC

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Simulating Physics Bug and Solution

Every time I play tested my game I would always get a huge list of the same error telling me that I was trying to simulate physics on a fully simulated skeletal mesh. This error was caused by a root bone that didn't have the right physics type and needed to be kinematic rather than the default physics.

Looking for a solution: Attempting to move fully simulated skeletal mesh error - Development / World Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums (unrealengine.com)

Found a solution but not sure how to implement it. Looked for guidance and found a solution on Reddit feed: adding bones to character physics asset ? : r/unrealengine (reddit.com)

Implementing the solution:

Had to add a new Physics body and set it to Kinematic.

After tweaking the physics type to kinematic the errors stopped appearing