So to update: I decided to ditch my efforts to make a physics based puzzle game for two reasons:

1. The cap on angular velocity.
2. I wanted to make a game where you get to blow things up.

If I’m honest it was mostly the blowing things up bit that turned me.

So using what I had already built as a base I started experimenting with making enemies that I could later shoot at. There was much messing around with navigation meshes and pathfinding before I eventually decided to ditch anything remotely complex and keep everything as simple as I could.

This resulted in an “Enemy” that looked exactly like the player and whose only behaviour was to roll towards them as fast as they could. Heck entire games have been sold that only have this behaviour.

With my simple enemy type I set about coding up a simple weapon class and targeting system. Bullets get shot towards the mouse. I used the basic Projectile class that is built into Unreal for my bullets and wrote a simple state machine for my gun that just spawned a bullet on a timer.

Behold!

This however was about from a week ago. This weekend I decided that it was time to give the game a full visual overhaul and get some sound up and running. You can see what the result of all that effort was beneath the cut:

I think it’s quite spiffy myself. The balls are still there but just hidden so the physics remains the same (although I’ve gone back to using impulses and not torque to avoid the angular velocity issue).

As well as giving the game a complete new look there were innumerable tweaks, bug fixes and indulgences that went on. Just getting the explosions to change hue over time was a couple of hours work alone and there was about 3 hours of completely failing to understand the math behind line-circle intersections in order to fix an issue with one of the enemy spawners (the friendly people in #Unrealscript will recall me appearing briefly just to rant about it last night).

Right now however I have a huge list of things to add, I have lots of different enemy types to add as well as more feedback and effects to implement and one game mechanic in particular that I think will be very interesting.

It’s been tentatively titled “Zero Point” by the way. It’s not a great name but I was tired of calling it “TestGame” feel free to leave suggestions in the comments thread.