
Momentum
Momentum is a game that I built and designed from the ground up. I started this project in college and have been working towards making it a unique and engaging experience. The game's goal is to get a ball through a series of rings; once you have passed through all the rings, you can move on to the next level. The more times you bounce the ball, the worse your rating; each level gets more challenging, requiring the player to strategize and devise a way of completing it using fewer bounces. The main mechanic in momentum is a dribble; instead of launching the ball upward like a jump, it launches it downward. This mechanic allows the player to do multiple actions. They can dribble the ball higher and higher or immediately change their upward velocity, shooting them back down toward a ring or a spot they want to bounce off of. This allows the player to traverse the arena precisely, bouncing off walls or the ground to build momentum to carry the ball through a ring. The player can also rotate the camera with the mouse and control the ball's horizontal movement with W,A,S,D; the player can add a force to the ball while airborne to steer it to a ring or a wall that they want to pass through or bounce off of.





Thoughts
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Creating the Dribble mechanic was easy, but making the ball bounce was much more complicated; I eventually used a sphere trace to simulate where the ball would make contact and calculate a new velocity for the ball on impact.
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I used interfaces to communicate between the rings and the character.
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Initially, I designed an obstacle course but soon realized that an arena would provide players more freedom. This shift in map design enhanced the player's experience and engagement.
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While I've been using super grids for materials, I'm eager to step up my game and create my own materials.
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The bouncing had a couple of bugs, mainly when you bounce really close to a wall, but I have fixed almost all of them now.
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I became familiar with using widgets by making the menus.