Team's progress:
This week we have been prepping for the alpha demo coming up. My teammates have been doing playtests with users, gathering feedback, and working on art while Pouria and I have been working on Unity.
My contributions:
The bugs/features I worked on since last update:
- fixed jump animation not always triggering
- fixed player freezing up during air attacks
- increase health of enemy and damage of guardian
- make canvas scale with screen
- update attack animation
- wall jumping + wall slide
- fix jump off ledge issue, added coyote time
- added short press jump and long press jump
- add wall slide animations
- added parallex effect
- change level layout
- fixed bug with attack sounds when spamming attack
- fixed bug which transitioned from attack3 to attack1 too early if spamming
- fixed issue with monster still dealing damage on death
- orb generation + collect
- display orb collection on ui
- close off boss area when entered
I fixed non game breaking bugs from the feedback of the last playtests and from the list of bugs I had found myself. One complaint from playtests was that jumping off of ledges was difficult and coyote time was suggested. I added this feature which made the jumping feel way more fluid along with a short/long press jump. Overall the jumping feels much better. I also added a parallax on the background which makes the level pleasing to look at.
The big feature I added was wall jumping and wall sliding. Wall sliding was fairly straightforward. I had to edit the wall grab sprites to be flush against the wall and flip them so the player looks right when holding a wall on the left. Wall jumping was more challenging than I anticipated. Initially I had to hold left/right to hold onto a wall, and when pressing jump, would give a force in the opposite direction. If the player kept holding left/right they would come back to the wall too fast and if they let go, would get launched too far. One challenge was to make the force feel consistent. I lowered the force but froze the players movement for a short time which made the jumping feel the same no matter the input from the player. I also added some smoothing so the players changes in direction didn't affect the velocity instantly. It was also finicky having to hold left/right to slide and the jump. I made it so the player doesn't have to hold a direction key and will just slide if they're touching the wall. I suppose to get the feature working initially wasn't too hard but it took a long time to make wall jumping feel good and not clunky.
Here is another feature I added when enemies drop orbs and the amount you have is displayed in the UI:
Reflection:
There was some feedback that seems to suggest wall jumping is too easy since you don't need to push against the wall and will just slide automatically. I will keep an eye on it and tweak it if necessary. I will look at the feedback from the Friday and Monday demos and see what different people say. The first area is filled up now and feels pretty good. We are missing some attack of the boss of area 1 but it is almost complete. We are starting to create assets for area 2 while the programmers finish up features/attacks/fix bugs. It is starting to feel like a game. It will be nice with some more polish.
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