noah

this was my entry for the most recent Unreal Engine jam, themed “as above, so below”; it’s a sort of pool / golf game where you have to hit all the targets on both sides of the board within a certain number of moves.

one of the more complicated and basically invisible parts is the custom physics—I needed to be able to step the simulation forward from any given state to show the “where will the ball go” trajectory preview, so I ditched Unreal’s physics system (which does not do that) and made a really basic 2D one from scratch in Blueprints. it’s exactly robust enough to handle the situations that can happen in this game and nothing beyond that.

a fun and very unnecessary bit of Graphics is that the etched arcs in the board’s surface are dynamic: they draw in and fade out over time so the pattern is constantly evolving. there’s a particle system drawing trails into a render target which then gets run through a live height-to-normal filter (crimes, I know) in the material.

here’s a video of how it plays:

if you’d like to try it for yourself, the download is here. thanks for reading!