Gas Me Up

Key Art!
Champions!
Different maps!
Various platforms
Gas your way to the win!
Climb high to win!
Watch out, you might fall!

Inspiration

Fall Guys was a huge inspiration due to the colorful and playful nature of the game.
Game shows like Most Extreme Elimination Challenge in humor and obstacle course creation.

What it does

This game is a platforming race game.

The goal is to enter races, collect gas and fart your way to winning!
You can collect power-ups like the spicy bean that makes you faster when farting or a gas mask that protects you from other players' fart weapons.
Speaking of fart weapons! Players can collect “weapons”. There are three kinds; Fart Blasts (blasting your enemies away from you), Stun Stinkers (shoot a toot behind you to stun an enemy competitor in a gas cloud) or a Gas Trap (if other players get trapped in the gaseous cloud, they will be stunned and can’t move).

How I built it

The game started off as a third person platformer, after testing, I realized the camera may not have shown the action as best as needed. So, it morphed into a 2D side scroller like Super Smash Brawl but I ran into some physics issues with jumping over or below a player. It’s final evolution, after having the power-ups and fart weapons, it ended up being more fun as a race game.

Challenges I ran into

Some of the major challenges I encountered was;

Character physics system, especially when it came to moving platforms or forces being applied to the player. The engine fights back causing some “ghost” forces counter pushing the player which can cause some player frustration. There’s also some sort of imaginary character capsule under or above the player so if a platform is moving or rotating under the player even after they jumped and arn’t touching the platform, it still causes the player to move with the platform.
Timing issues. When players enter the world, they technically do…but the loading screen is still active for about 5-10 seconds. So many of the scripts were getting misfired when players entered the world. Sometimes things like the PlayerCamera would not attach properly or the most important PlayerControllerLocal or HUDLocal, if the PlayerControllerLocal was not attached, then players couldn’t fart jump as needed.
The Character animation system which has hidden issues. Often I would animate the character in Blender, import it to horizon (which was its own challenge as the official documentation on the website isn’t accurate) and when playing the animation in the engine, the legs or arms wouldn’t move as it was in the raw animation. I learnt there is a hidden angle threshold for the arms and legs. As long as I was within the tolerance, the animations would work as intended.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Nailing down the fart flying feels good and is comical. Especially adding the custom animations to the player.
Figuring out the camera system was good too as it offers a better level of quality and feel I was looking for.
Using the tools the engine has to help make the game come to life. Also, learning the engine is an accomplishment on it’s own!

What I've learned

I’ve learned a number of things!

How to import animations and play them on characters
How to program various obstacles and make them do what I envisioned
How to work with audio so that I can play sounds locally or globally and fade in and out giving the game a smoother hearing experience
I’ve learned how to make better prompts when using the GenAI system horizon has to get the best results I need
I’ve learned about the sublevel system, asset creation and updating system
How to use the leaderboard system with persistent variables
A cosmetic system that anchors cosmetics to players heads or torso