Grappling hook and Shifting priorities

The ability I added this week was the grappling hook. Getting this ability to work exactly how I wanted ended up being more difficult that I expected. Essentially, the ability shoots out a raycast to a point, then applies a force on the player, moving them towards that point. Simple enough at first, but I started to get into the weeds on how exactly to apply that force.  Initially I had the ability manually alter the players position, but that resulted in several cases where the player would be thrown through walls. After that I moved on to setting the players input mode to flight and then applying movement input in the direction of the point, but it turns out that that the maximum flight speed is abysmal. Then I tried simply launching the character in the right direction, but this ended up being too imprecise.  Ultimately, I ended up using a combination of the launch method and flight+input method for an effect similar to what I wanted. 

After that came endless tweaks and problems. I had an issue for a while where the player would 'ice skate' by grappling into the ground, so I made it so the grapple ended when they touched the ground. That was all well and good, except now I had an issue where the grappling hook sometimes didn't work when trying to grapple onto something straight ahead or slightly below your sightline. I ended up introducing a grace period that prevents the grapple from canceling too early, but its still not perfect.

 Then I got to work on the VFX. After some research I found out about Unreal's cable component, which was just what I was looking for. Problem was, like all good things in Unreal, it was incredibly finicky. I had numerous issues with the rotation of the component and properly attaching the different ends, but was eventually able to find a tutorial covering the fact that you actually have to INVERT the position you give to the cable attachment points in order to make it work correctly. After all that it  wasn't perfect but it was more or less working, and I decided  my time would be best spent elsewhere. Much to my chagrin, it turns out the cable component is completely broken in the build...

But, yeah, moving into the end of week 3, and into week 4, we had several discussions regarding the direction of the game. We want to get it ready for testing, so we have realigned our priorities. Personally this has resulted in me moving several VFX focused cards to next month so that I can focus on getting things working rather than looking pretty.

Here's a video going into detail on the grappling hook.