Description

Master the timeless art of bowling in this throwback to Wii Sports!

• Experience the thrill of bowling with full control of your character’s arm
  • With support for mouse, touch screen, and even motion controls!
• Play a full round of bowling from start to finish
• Play as a procedurally-generated Yuu avatar

A silly video of me playing with the motion controls on my phone:

Built with the DUETween plugin!

About the Project

Yuu Recreations: Bowling started a long time ago as a project I started to get to grips with Unreal Engine. I both wanted to remake a beloved game from my youth (Wii Sports: Bowling) and see how Unreal could handle a game genre that was a bit different from what people usually built with it (shooters, 3rd person action games, etc.). It turns out that was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be because it took me 2 years to turn it into something releasable, but I am very proud of how it turned out and I learned a lot about Unreal along the way!

The game itself is built with a mixture of Blueprints and C++ gameplay code (I would say roughly 70% C++ 30% blueprint). I started with basic swipe controls that allow you could use to wind-up and curve the bowling ball, iterating on the feel of it on both mouse and touch until it felt just right. I developed the motion controls by using the gyro rotation of the phone and tying it to the arm movement, which I thought would just be a dumb experiment at first but turned out to work a lot better than I thought. The physics also took a lot of tuning to get right.

I started with trying to mimic real bowling masses, center of gravity, etc. but it turns out that isn’t very fun, so I ended up making the pins topple very easily by using a combination of low mass and low center-of-gravity so they were stable jusssstttt until the ball hit them and they would fly hard.

Along the way I made a little tweening framework that grew into the DUETween plugin that I love and will be using on all of my Unreal projects going forward.

Project Progress Video:

The entire project source code is available on github: https://github.com/jaideng123/UnrealBowling

Twitter Progress Thread https://x.com/JaidenG123/status/1507833805532327936