Most of the games I’ve created up to this point were created in Unity. With this project I wanted to expand my skills and look at a different major engine in the market: The famous Unreal Engine.
The goal of the course this game was built in, was using the Kinect and thanks to the people at Opaque the linking the Kinect SDK to the engine was already done so getting started was quite easy. The controller for the hoverbike pawn was thus easily made in a few minutes. Getting the UI to work well with the Kinect was a little bit trickier because the engine is built for mouse and key or gamepad input. The final build used the vector from the shoulder to the hand and put the cursor there. This way existing UI components could be reused and made things quite easy (maybe I should have replaced the cursor with a hand :)).
I really enjoyed working with UE4 and probably will have a deeper look at it in the future. The learning curve is pretty steep because it offers a lot of tools and provides the developer with a predefined gameplay framework which you have to get used to but once you do you clearly see the benefits of using it.