Polacool

ROLE

Game Designer / UI Programmer

DESCRIPTION

The first game I made with Unreal Engine while I was in University. In Polacool, we control a flying squirrel who can grind on designated areas with his skateboard. The assignment for this game was to create a character controller that felt good and offered a little something special. Six projects were then chosen to be fleshed out and completed by creating three rooms connected by two hallways. The original prototype which included the gliding and the grinding mechanic was created by my partner Tassos Karras and myself.

YEAR

2020

GENRE

Platformer, Skateboarding, Cute

PLATFORM

MADE WITH

Unreal Engine 4

Grinding on rails

Since Polacool was our first dive in Unreal Engine 4, we did our best to implement at least one skateboard mechanic which ended up being the act of grinding on rails.For this action, we used Unreal Engine’s splines as railing which allowed us to connect the character to them and then make Polacool move along the spline from the point of contact between the railing and the character to the end of the spline.

As we were developing this mechanic, we quickly realized how difficult it was going to be. We were easily able to connect the character to the spline on contact and then make the character move along the spline but only from its starting point to its end. The real challenge was to figure out where the character touched the spline and in which direction it was facing compared to the direction of the spline. With these two pieces of information, we were finally able to put the character at the right position along the spline and make it go in the right direction.

Unreal's controller Navigation

While making Polacool, we decided to go towards a cuter aesthetic for the game to fit with the cute nature of a flying squirrel. With that in mind, we decided to communicate the visuals of the different interfaces as if they were drawings and writings done by the owner of the main character Polacool.

As it was my first experience with Unreal engine 4, it was also the first time in which I programmed the navigations through the menus and was able to make them controllable with the controller all through blueprints. Through this experience, I’ve discovered how using the basic functionalities of Unreal for UI navigation brings a lot of limitations and challenges to get through them.

If I could make it again

As it was a school project, a lot of basic functionalities that would be seen in a real game on the market are still missing like a pause menu or keyboard and mouse support. The game is beatable with keyboard and mouse, but only because the basic controls of unreal were never removed as the task was to make the game playable through the controller first and foremost.

Other decisions and inputs might even seem weird, but were prerequisites for evaluations. An example of this would be the pause button restarting the game from the beginning of the level and the escape button of the keyboard to directly close the game. These inputs were required and obligatory in case a project wouldn’t have an easily accessible exit game button or in case the evaluators would get softlock in a level and would need to restart it.

If I could remake Polacool again, I would fix those issues to improve the overall global experience like a pause menu where the player could quit the game and restart the level like a regular game would offer. I would also make the game keyboard and mouse compatible and update the inputs prompt. At last, I would add at least some basic options to make the game more enjoyable such as a volume slider for the sounds and music and screen settings such as resolution, window mode, v-sync, qualities, etc.

Evo\Wave

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