This prototype was made as a classic 2D Shoot ‘Em Up style game such as Gradius. I programmed this game in Unreal Engine 4 entirely with Blueprints using Object-Oriented Programming concepts.

The gameplay features I implemented include:

• Ship movement in 2D space.
• Power-ups with various effects, and indicated by the HUD when obtained.
• Lock-on reticle controlled by thumbstick. Reticle takes fastest path to specific position along circle.
• Ability to paint targets with reticles, and shooting homing projectiles.
• Enemy flight patterns.

The biggest challenge in this prototype was figuring out how to control the targeting reticles in this specific manner:

The reticles needed to move in around in a circle on a 2D plane using the right-thumbstick of a gamepad, and the reticle needed to rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on how close its current position was to the desired position. Some trigonometric functions were required to make this work.