Don't Turn... #3

Week 5 - Preparing for the playtest

Checkpoints decrease Curse

One of the mechanics we wanted to implement was that the player can heal themselves when at a checkpoint.

The first version of the checkpoints utilizes the On Trigger Stay method, which is called every frame that a collider is inside it. This worked for simply changing the players respawn but is quite inefficient as there will be a large number of calls per second when checking whether to heal the player and when saving.

To improve this, I swapped On Trigger Stay with On Trigger Enter, which is only called on the first frame a collider enters the trigger.

On Validate method:

While reading through the unity documentation I came across the On Validate method, which is called when a script is loaded or a value changes in the inspector.

This allows me to get some references to components on the same object without needing to manually set them. For example:

This change does not affect gameplay however and is purely to clean up the inspector for the developers.

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Week 6, acting on feedback:

New Dash Bug

Fixing the previous multi-shot dash bug in the last dev log introduced a new bug where if the player pressed the dash button while it was on cooldown and then turned in another direction, the player would dash in the new direction but the bullet would still try to move in the opposite direction.

This was caused by a while loop I had implemented into the dash coroutine. I swapped this out for an if statement, as well as checking which way the player should dash and which way to shoot during the dash rather than before the dash like it was before and problem solved.

Coyote Jump

A major problem people who played faced was parkour being too difficult.

To alleviate this problem, we decided to add in a 'Coyote' Jump. This allows the players to jump a few frames after leaving a platform, allowing the platforming to be more forgiving.

To do this I added a timer that counts down when the player is no longer grounded and the jump can only be triggered if that timer is greater than 0.

Jump Startup animation:

Something I wanted to test out was having the players jump 'charge' up for a couple of frames before they actually jump. I wanted to try this out because we had a frame in the jump animation where the player crouches down.

I used a coroutine to wait for a small amount of time after the jump button was pressed and then executed the jump. However, this broke up the flow of the movement and made the jump feel very sluggish, on top of this triggering the animation and then walking off the edge had a side effect of the player jumping way after leaving the platform. Looking at other 2D platformers, like dead cells, it seems that they do not have this feature and manage to get a responsive and clean jump.

Ultimately I decided it would be better to remove this from the game. During my next meeting with my team, i will consult them about this and determine whether it's something we need in our game.

Conclusion

In these past 2 weeks I have learnt the power of black box testing as it highlighted key problems with the game in it's current state that were not apparent while testing ourselves. We will set out on adjusting the feedback before our next playtest.