Rocket Jumping

One day in the studio I and a colleague were just talking about how a certain game mechanic might be made with blueprints in Unreal Engine 4, this mechanic was ‘Rocket Jump’. After a bit of research on the mechanic on various forums we understood the basic principle of how it works.

So, basically how a rocket jump mechanic works is that a radial force is spawned where the projectile hits/lands. In this case if a player looks down and shoots a weapon, the radial force will propel the player’s character opposite to the point of impact of the projectile.

Next up was to try and make it actually in the engine, I started off with a simple 1st person starter map. This had all the essentials required to make this rocket jump mechanic.

This was just a fun exercise I was doing and turns out that to make the character do rocket jumps was not complicated at all and can be very easily done in Unreal Engine 4 with blueprints in under 5-10 mins.

The first step is to make a new blueprint (actor) preferably where the projectile blueprint is, the blueprint should look like this:

• The ‘force component’ pin is visible only after un-checking the context sensitive check-box

• The force strength is not an error, should be tweaked on the basis of the force that is applied.

Now that the radial force blueprint set-up was complete all I had to do was in the FirstPersonProjectile blueprint add a ‘SpawnActor from Class’ node and after the connections are done it should look like this:

It’s as simple as this; now I pressed play in the editor window and it worked like a charm.