Phantom Veil is a third-person action parkour project that was the next project I jumped into during the pandemic.
After I finished work on Dark Nexus, I wanted to design something different that broadened my knowledge of the Unreal Engine as a whole. I’ve always liked games with smooth-feeling movement, growing up with the older Assassins’s Creed games and then later being enamoured by Ghostrunner and Insomniac’s Spider-Man’s traversal systems. Coupled with my background in martial arts and parkour myself, it seemed like a fun idea!
Details:
Self-Made Project
Time: January 2021-December 2021
Primary Focus: Gameplay Systems/Level Design
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Overview
For this project I came up with a list of goals for creating the parkour system, as well as outlining level design parameters for a playable world space and how the player would be able to interact with the enivornmnet with the parkour system.
My goals were:
Design a parkour movement system with a set of amount of movement options depending on player actions.
Blueprint a special “Phantom” system that speeds up the gameplay and makes the movement feel more fluid and cool.
Design materials and particle effects that trigger when the Phantom system is active for visual feedback.
Script interactable world objects for the player to interact with.
Design a level space that teaches players about the different types of movement and showcases both the normal parkour and high-speed movement of the Phantom system.
Parkour System
For the the parkour system, I split it into seven different types of movement:
Wall running
Wall climbing
Mantle (hanging from a ledge and climbing up, I also including vaulting in this blueprint)
Sliding
Sprinting
A lot went into blueprinting each individual mechanic so I’ll explain how they function within the overall system and how they’re regulated. The parkour system itself is an actor blueprint that’s attached to the player character as a component.
For handling them all I ran a sequence node that’s connected to what I call a “gate” system blueprint. The “gates” made it so the events for each movement type couldn’t be used at any point, the player had to fulfill the right conditions to be able to perform an action. It also made it so that while the player was engaging in one form of parkour, that movement type’s gate is “open” and another one can’t be opened unless the previous gate is closed and the player matches the conditions to be able to enter that next movement state.
To use the example in the gif here, at the start the player is sprinting, which means the “sprinting gate” is open and they’re in the sprinting movement mode. The player jumps, which because they are no longer sprinting, closes that gate and makes the movement mode become neutral.
As the player approaches the highlighted wall, because that wall can be interacted with and the player approaches it from this angle, that opens the “wall running gate” and switches over to the wall running mode. This occurs for each wall until the players feet touches ground again, and with the sprint button being held and a wall not being interacted with anymore, switches to the sprinting system again, until the slide button is attempted to be pressed. Because the player is running on the ground and has enough speed, this closes the sprint gate to open up the sliding gate and the player enters the sliding movement mode to trigger the animation.
Phantom Mode System
The “Phantom Mode” system is a material/particle system which engages when the player is in the sprint movement mode. This increases the player movement speed and can also be used in tandem with other movement modes, such as jumping slightly further distances, wall running along a wall without beginning to move down and having more speed and going further distances with the parkour slide. Originally I had another idea for this system which incorporated stealth and played more on the “veil” part of the title, but this felt really satisfying to use so I went with it!
The system uses a material made using cloud textures, along with particle sparks and line trails that are attached to each limb of the player character.
The system is attached to the player as a component, and is incorporated into the players sprint button itself so that it’s not tied directly to the parkour system and its gate requirements, yet is still going to utilized, primarily by sprinting at first before going into other parkour modes.
Phantom Mode also has an energy consumption system attached to it. There’s a UI bar that runs out as the system is used, and has to be replenished via the player collecting energy cubes as they progress through the playable space.
Level Design
The level design is primarily split into two different parts: multi-part platforming and streamlined speed segments. The idea was that parkour can be a very technical activity. You have to be precise with your movements and be able to think on your feet to be able to overcome the various obstacles, and sometimes the way isn’t straightforward.
To convey this I started the level with individual segments that introduce each form of parkour, and then subsequently split different segments of the level into the two parts I mentioned before. The first part with more platforming was slower and more methodical, with the player having larger areas to climb up and across on. I put a lot of emphasis on vertical and horizontal movement on these segments, as I wanted these segments to be where players would look around their environemnt to find where would be useful to go to reach their objective, similar to how people climb buildings in real life.
The second level segment was primarily made up of long narrow corridors and put more of an emphasis on the Phantom Mode and the speed it gives the player. This was meant to be as a reward for players for doing the slower parkour by allowing them to wall run, jump and slide through these segments in a nice flow, that also rewards players for using speed and timing to string together seamless freerunning.
For the different parkour moves I made different sized meshes that the player could interact with for each parkour move depending on the size so that there weren’t problems with the players collision reading a surface incorrectly. I also made cube objects that could refill the Phantom Mode’s energy for the player to collect. These I placed primarily in the platforming parkour segments to make sure the gauge was filled for the player to use when they get to the speed segments.