LATEST UPDATE:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi everyone ! thanks for having a look at my project!
I decided to make a 2.5D side scroller . I have been teaching myself the unreal engine for a bit over a year now and I just love it . I am not planning anything ground breaking as I still have so much to learn but I want to create something that feels nice and fun to play .
I have been doing a few small projects before to learn various skills but nothing that I took very seriously so I decided to start a proper (still small) game .
For this project I got my other half on board, she is a much better artist than I am .
She is doing all the concept art/character design, a lot of the texturing and also anything related to colour (I am colour blind so she correct all the ugly stuff I keep making

)
I will be taking care of the development we share the modelling and level design .
We are not quite experience with anything related with sound and music so we are not too sure what will happen on that front yet .
THE GAME :
JUX is the name of the main character . he lives on a peaceful and beautiful planet until a bunch of robot space pirates land on it and make trouble . Your goal will be to recover the parts of a magic item powerful enough to defeat your enemies when reassembled !
JUX is a character that we have been playing with long before creating thing game :
A couple of drawing of the character a year or 2 before the game project started .


Some of the concept made for the game .

The short leg design was a bit of an issue for the animation so after a bit of tweaking in 3d we ended up with this .

We are planning for JUX to have only a few basic abilities and rely on level design to make the game fun, no crazy power or anything like that . So far the character can :
-jump
-double jump
-wall jump . the character will stick to the wall for about half a second before starting falling if no jump input is given .
-throw a magnet . the character has a magnet attach to a rope that can be used as a weapon or a swing .
-rope swing . A lot of time as been spent and wasted on this . At first I tried to implement a physics based system that I got working nicely about 99% of the time but once in a while it would behave in a strange way which made the game very frustrating to play . I decided to scrap it and made a non physics-based one, after quite a lot of playing around I got it to a point where I am almost happy with it .
I also tried to type of hooking system for the swing rope :
1-the character had the ability to throw his magnet and stick it onto everything the magnet touch (wall, platform...), on paper it did sound good but in practice it wasn't very nice to use . I use the left joystick on the gamepad to move the character and also to select the direction you throw the magnet into and it didn't feel nice .
2-you can only hook the swing rope to specific hook point . This is a bit more limiting but I found it a lot more fun to play . I decided to choose this one .
I don't think I will had more functionality to the character (at least for now)
This is the beginning of the first level, it is pretty safe as you can't die but have to master the different character abilities in order to progress .
Design wise we when for a colourful cartoony cute look .
We also started on the enemies design . We made a 3d model of one of them . It is still very much a WIP it needs a bit more details, textures and also a cape ! but we are happy with the proportions .
