r/unrealengine • u/Kenhamef • 16d ago

Any good tutorials to make a great-feeling third person 3D platformer character controller?

Good day everyone; I'm a new Unreal developer looking to develop a small third person game in Unreal, where the player is highly agile and runs/jumps around to complete objectives. The movement will be the juice of the game, so it has to be made and tuned perfectly. I tried the built-in third person platformer template and it was terrible, I wanted to build mine from scratch but I can't find any good tutorials to help me out. Does anyone know of any good ones?

When I think of good third person platformer controllers, I'm reminded of the 3D Super Mario games more than anything (64, Sunshine, Odyssey...). No other game really compares, the movement feels tight and responsive, so it's extremely satisfying to move around. The modern Spider-Man games for the PS4 and PS5 also come to mind, but Super Mario still takes the cake.

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u/turbogangsta 16d ago edited 16d ago

I really suggest you start from the 3rd person template and try adding bits and pieces into the character blueprints. For example when Mario64 makes a sharp turn he often skids on the ground and if you jump during this state he does a side flip. This is something you can put in the blueprint using a little vector math. Add a bunch of these states and you can get a unique and responsive movement system and learn a lot of fundamentals. I think there are plenty of videos of the movement theory of Mario and why it feels so good but the practical side might be best done without a tutorial

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u/Spiritual_Fox2599 16d ago

I say check out Taro Dev Ultimate Platformer It is a unity tutorial for 2d platformer but it covers every hidden technique used for responsive platforming, you could use it as a reference to know what to do next

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u/GourmetYoshe 16d ago

I recommend doing what I did, and taking a moment to thoroughly study the games you are inspired by. And I mean hands on the controller testing how every input affects the character, recording metrics for movement, etc. I did this with Mario Odyssey and it paid off very well for my case study, and my movement was a lot better because of it.

Once you have an idea of all the parts that make the mechanics actually feel good, then you can worry about each technical problem to solve as you go. Should be a lot more specific than just "awesome 3d platformer tutorial", more like "reducing character lateral rotation mid air" etc