The mallet is one of the main components of our whack-a-mole game. I added the 3D model assets to the player and animate it using Unreal Engine's Timeline node. We considered animating the mallet to actually move towards the target but we decided that it was too complicated for our scope and timeframe.
I made the decision for the mallet to go up when player hold left click and then slam down when left click was released. This creates a tactile feeling and enables the player to hold up the mallet without having to slam it down instantly. In playtests, we found that feature to be useful as players use it to stop themselves from whacking the rats which reduces score.
My biggest contribution was implementing 2 ending cutscenes, those were a major part of the game's narrative. Mole Mayhem have a good and bad ending based on player's performance. I came up with the storyboard, then communicated to the artists about the needed assets.
The cutscenes were animated with blueprint by changing character sprite and utlizing Timeline node to move player camera and objects. Given our limited time frame, we decided to only do basic cutscenes, hence my decision to use this method.
I created the post-processing effects to enhance the game's visual style. This includes pixelation, color posterization, bloom, vignette, motion blur, and subtle fisheye lens distortion.
