Endless Runner Completed
How to play
Navigate menus by using the mouse and left clicking on the desired option.
Avoid glowing obstacles and running into walls.
Aim to beat your high score!
A and D are to move left and right respectively. They are also used to turn corners in their respective direction.
Jump with the spacebar.
Pause the game with the TAB key.
Collect coins to further increase your score.
Collect golden nuggets for a massive score boost.
Collect shields to become immune to common obstacles (blockers).
Collect a slow-down power-up to cease speeding up for a bit, at the cost of losing a lot of traction.
Post-Mortem
I feel very satisfied with this fully functional endless runner which I have completed. Although I didn’t meet a lot of the desirables mentioned in the brief, I met many of my own personal desirables. The game functions well and I find it fun to play, with high scores being a powerful motivating factor. The high score does not rely too strongly on any particular power-up, so it feels fair each time I play. Golden nuggets can influence the score greatly, however each golden nugget collected is worth double the point value of the previous one. Many golden nuggets must be collected before a substantial difference is made.
I find the constantly changing light colour on the coins to be very visually appealing. It was a personal goal to find a way to make the changing colours work, and I did this in a way that turned out exactly as I imagined it. I also wanted to see if I could make the coins spawn in a row, which required a lot of time and effort and turned out to be a challenging function to write, with lots of trial and error. Ultimately, I managed to do this, but also made each coin in the line rotate at a different rate so that it has an appealing effect as you are running. I also wanted to make a tile that was very different, which lead me to creating the rotating cylinder tiles, which also worked well and provided some additional challenge.
Sometimes an error will appear upon ending the game, because if the player dies in the cylinder room, the spark particle effect might move for a bit after they have died, colliding with other walls. Since these walls cast anything that touches them to the player character (so it can kill them), but the cast fails and creates errors. I don’t know how to fix this, but it doesn’t affect gameplay and you can only tell that there are errors because Unreal sends messages of the errors after ending the game. Because it didn’t negatively affect gameplay, I didn’t fix this.
I am very pleased with the endless runner which I have created, and have learned a lot about blueprints through creating it.