Well, a while ago I participated in an Epic Game Jam and the theme was "Old-Fashioned Future"... I understood the idea as renewing a retro game mechanic while fitting into an "old" or "medieval" context. So I had the idea of making a "Breakout", with a "Samurai theme" and additional combat mechanics hahaha. I didn't manage to put everything together in time, but the result of this madness can be seen below.
I've always liked prototyping mechanics and testing concepts in the UE and since it's become fashionable to talk about 3C's (Character, Camera and Control), I'm going to talk about how my perception changed regarding movement control during this project (maybe this contributed to the delay in finishing XD).
At first I had configured the inputs the way they naturally fit "in my hand" on the keyboard (WASD), LMB for attack and Shift for running. Up until then, the game was technically "ready", but it gave me the feeling that it wasn't "immersive" enough, there was a missing "Q" that didn't make the game "feel good in the hands".
Then I noticed that just clicking to attack and moving the ball weren't enough of a challenge because the character moved superficially (hold A or hold D), basically like the Breakout platform, except that the player was forced to attack to hit the ball. Increasing the momentum the ball received only made the behavior more erratic, which didn't help with the feeling I was looking for.
So I decided to put the character's acceleration control on the mouse and have this acceleration change according to the "force" the player uses on the mouse to move the character sideways... And it literally fit like a glove.
The control now created the expectation of reaching the ball because you had to move your hand as if you really wanted to catch it (this is a pain for those with small mousepads, lol). As a side effect, the character had this jittering in the animation, but I found it funny how much it changed the experience just by changing how the player interacts with the game (maybe I would have realized this sooner if I used a joystick ._.)
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