Sunset Overdrive Style Rail Grinds

I’ve been thinking about specific mechanics I want to try making, along with thinking about what new thing it will let me learn. We all know Sunset Overdrive whips, so I decided to try some rail grind mechanics inspired by the game. I used splines to define lines that the player could snap to when they’re close, and the player will go back and forth along the spline as the get to the end. They’re able to snap to new splines as they travel, which was the best way I’ve so far found to get the character to grind at sharp angles, like a right angle. I also threw in a bounce pad in the second half of the video, when the player jumps off the cloth overhang to reach the wires higher on the building.

This has been a really cool thing to work on. Nearly every challenge so far has involved making splines at an incline - in other words, any time there’s variation in the z-axis. I’m able to regularly travel up and down an inclined spline, but I currently am working on making it so the character will correctly turn around when at the bottom of the spline - this is an automatic process and currently the character is not actually getting near the end of the spline, which is not a problem when there is no z-axis variation. The character also still doesn’t move as fast going upwards as they do going downwards. Figuring out where this is happening in UE4 has proven difficult, but I want to get it figured out.

I also want to implement the ability to “hang” by the splines as well. Obviously there aren’t any animations here but the point would be to have some kind of trigger near the top of the character as well as on the bottom as I do now. It would require changing how the character’s transform is manipulated so they stay under the spline rather than on top of it as they are now.

It was really fun to get this system set up and have my character zipping around and jumping between rails. This kind of locomotion stuff gives really immediate feedback. I’m still figuring out how to massage Unreal’s default character setup to get a feel I like - it’s definitely the kind of thing I imagine digging into the code yields the best results for, but even so, there’s plenty exposed in the UI to toy with to find a good feel.

A final note, the environment in the video thumbnail and the second half of the video is the out of the box demo scene for the Modular Building Set asset pack on the Unreal Marketplace. I added the pipe/wire the character grinds on and made the overhang bounce, but otherwise I haven’t added or modified anything in the scene.