This week I dedicated most of my time to working on an Unreal Engine 5 project to start learning blueprints. The goal was to create a somewhat viable swinging system similar to Spider-Man.

My first attempt I was trying to figure out how to work this out mostly alone by using a Physics Constraint. I got to the point of connecting a cable between the player and a sphere, but there was no player input during the swing. This is because my solution was to spawn a sphere above the player, connect the physics constraint and turn on physics simulation on the player’s capsule. This disables player movement.

I tried thinking of a good solution for fixing this problem, but instead opted for finding a UE4 tutorial for manually calculating the force of the swing and keeping the player connected to the sphere. I used this tutorial: (2650) Spider Man Web Swinging Tutorial Unreal Engine 4 - YouTube. I implemented everything besides animations.

This ended up being an okay implementation. I would at least be able to tweak it to come up with a better implementation than I would have on my own. What I did not get to do was Spider-Man’s “zip-to-point” system, which I would like to try in the future.