Devlog 11: Elijah Jackson: Hammer Time

"Hammer Time"

Elijah Jackson

06/19/2025

Recently, I've been working with the hammer's functionality in the game. The hammer is a weapon that we have had a clear vision of from the beginning of the game. We wanted to have a melee weapon that emulated Mjolnir (Thor's hammer in Norse myth) by having a lightning strike ability, and the ability to return to the player when thrown. This week, I've been working on the creation of those upgrades to the base hammer (which can currently swing and be thrown).

Hammer Return:

First, I tackled the returning of the hammer back to the player after it is thrown. This won't be a feature that is enabled by default, but will result from upgrades being applied later in the game. This gives the hammer the ability to deal extra damage while returning, while also bypassing the need to retrieve the hammer after it is thrown. I accomplished this by using Unreal Engine's projectile system to create a homing projectile. Then, I modified the code of the projectile to run the pickup function for the hammer when the projectile hits the player that owns it. This was important to think of in reference to multiplayer because we don't want the hammer to be picked up by other players while in flight. The final result of the hammer's throwing looks like this:

Weapon Abilities:

Next, I worked on the framework for the weapon abilities system overall. At its core we want abilities to be tied to the specific weapons and upon activation they add a cooldown that has to expire before the ability can be activated again. This system functions very similar to the player abilities that I had worked on prior which supports our ability based combat system overall.

Hammer Ability:

After that, I got to work on the special ability for the hammer itself. The hammer will have the ability to call down a lightning strike where the player is looking for area of effect damage. To create the ability, I used a similar system to how our game's aiming works to get the point that the player is looking at to spawn an explosion actor for damaging.

Additionally, this explosion actor has some VFX tied to it that allow the player to visibly see a lightning strike at the point that they call the strike itself. At it's core the ability allows the player to look and spawn an explosion at a certain point. Currently, it looks like this:

Hammer Replication:

The last bit of work that I did this week was finishing the replication of the hammer's main attack. Prior, the player could only attack once and then the hammer would freeze in multiplayer. Now, after working with multicasting and ensuring that the melee collision box is spawned for all players the hammer works as intended in multiplayer. Currently, there is a bug with the crosshair not flashing sometimes upon dealing melee damage which I plan to fix soon.

Up Next:

Next up, I plan to pivot my work to focus on ensuring that the multiplayer experience is as strong as possible. I'm going to ensure that all gameplay elements work as intended on both client and server. Thank you for reading!