Supersonic Dodgeball is a simple interactive experiment in establishing the feeling of impact that was built in Unreal. I am extremely passionate about working on projects that focus on communicating motion or feel, and this was my first real opportunity to do a project entirely focused on that concept.

 

As a whole, this project communicates the feeling I wanted to get across, especially when the controller is actually in your hands. The mix of visuals, sound, and gameplay managed to hook several testers in for a few minutes, just wanting to throw the ball around. I'm considering coming back to these systems later to hook this into a simple target practice game.

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I think that the three core parts of this experiment are the ripple effect, the motion of the throw, and the slow motion. The ripple effect is one of the earliest items I implemented into the project, and was used to establish the force of the impact. While I tweaked how fast and how large it was throughout playtesting, it proved to be reliable in creating its intended effect. As for the motion of the throw, that was added to make sure the player had a sense of presence and physicality. When the hands and camera motion were not present, the ball felt disconnected and the weight of the impact wasn't being communicated properly. After the motion's introduction, it immediately felt more heavy to players.

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The slow motion was introduced for two reasons. First, slow motion can feel really cool to players and introduce a lot of emphasis to the high-speed impact of the ball. Second, the slow motion helped players track what was happening when the ball was impacting something at high speed nearby the player. However, at longer distances, the slow motion felt like it didn't have context - so it will only trigger nearby when the ball is going at a high speed.