For a third-person perspective, the crosshair was not aligned with the camera's forward vector. Therefore, I utilized a line trace along a specific channel, originating from the screen location of the crosshair and extending a reachable distance in front of the player.

Since combat can be chaotic, if no object was directly within the player's crosshair, I implemented a secondary sphere trace to detect any nearby objects around the player that were not obscured by walls.

The nearest detected object would always be stored in a reference variable with a post-process highlight effect activated to indicate to the user what was currently within pull range.

When the player activates telekinesis with a valid object, it is attached to a physics handle on the player. While this handles much of the position updating, collaborating with another designer and programmer allowed us to add interpolation and position offsets based on each object's size.

To denote objects that were pullable, I made an actor component you could easily attach to any static mesh in the level. It would automatically set the correct variables and channels needed, but also had adjustable values for different behaviors.

When using the physics handle, I wanted to give players more control and responsiveness over held objects. I started by implementing a system where the object would rotate with the camera's pitch, allowing it to follow the player's gaze when looking up or down.

This enhancement helped players stack objects using telekinesis. Additionally, I added an adjustable offset for the physics handle to control the distance of objects from the player. This prevented objects from colliding with the player or going off-screen, improving the overall feel.

I attempted to implement a system to update the physics handle's location when encountering walls, aiming to keep the object consistently in view. However, this led to issues with items clipping through walls or becoming permanently stuck. As a result, we later decided to simply drop the object if it moved too far from the player.

To give players a sense of control and power, I designed launched objects to have a strong impulse force and temporary no-gravity for 'x' seconds. Upon impact, the object's behavior was determined by its assigned enum in the actor component, allowing for actions like sticking, destroying/exploding, bouncing, etc.

The third-person perspective presented challenges for aiming. I initially used a line trace from the held object's location to where a secondary, extended crosshair line trace would hit. Since this wasn't a direct line to the crosshair (like a camera's forward vector would provide), accuracy often felt off.

Later in the project, working with a programmer, I designed and he implemented a solution using a larger sphere trace to detect objects, rather than a thin line trace. While this improved accuracy, I aim to refine this system further in the future. Control locks on targets and I prototyped this too, but I decided against this to keep the theme of freedom for the player.