Feedback received! Redesigning the movement system. Week 5

By: Morgan Nilsson / February 19, 2015 /

/ No Comments

Note: I forgot to mention last week what game concept I am working with and I deeply apologize for that! The game concept me and my team chose is The Last Signal. And without any further ado.

Welcome back for another week of game design with Morgan Nilsson!

Let’s jump straight into the action! This week we had a day dedicated to testing our games, and it was very fruitful. Tons of great feedback and ideas where brought up! Which is great since we all know, when you have been staring at things for hours, it is extremely easy to get blind to extremely obvious shortcomings that others can spot in an instant! (It is also extremely relatable to last week’s post regarding interface design!)

So, the movement we had up until Monday this week were:

The character accelerates in speed as long as the “use thruster” button is held, until it reaches its peak speed.
After the “use thruster” button is released, the character will continue to be in motion in the previous direction it was last accelerating in, speed decreases over time.
The character only accelerates in the direction the player is currently aiming.

And the issue were, that it felt like gliding on ice, which obviously, blatantly goes against our target aesthetic of being in an environment with no gravity in it.

The feeling of being on ice comes from two things, the character always faces the cursor of the mouse with no exception, which leads to the character being able to do instant 180 turns if you flip the mouse cursor around in the vicinity of the characters point of origin. (Which means the origin the 2d-sprite is rotating around)

The other thing is, the character do have motion after the release of the “thrust forward” button in the same direction it was previously going, however, the motion is braked, or “lost”. Which obviously wouldn’t happen in a zero gravity environment where motion tend to meet no resistance, thus it would have a negligible if any effect at all on the residual speed.

There are a number of possible solutions to this dilemma, and I am going to present the one I am currently biased towards at the moment:

I wish for our game to keep the characters aim to be handled through the use of a mouse. And at the same time, keep a certain delay to it, so the instant snap turns wouldn’t be possible. Thus preventing part of the problem that the player feels it is moving on ice.

Here is a great example of what I had in mind: http://jesper.nu/spel/tankblitz-zero… What I want you to focus on is the way the tanks aim is handled, there is an obvious delay and if you go right and left on the tanks origin with the cursor, you clearly see the tank attempting to turn to the cursor with a significant delay.

The issue I imagine our game might have with this method, is perhaps that the player wouldn’t understand where the delay is coming from unless it is obviously presented. For a tank it is natural to assume it would have some delay in its turnrate, so in the players mind, it is perfectly natural. However, in shooters, players tend to feel “snapping” aim is more natural, thus this may feel like an unintentional design or perhaps a bug. The solution to this is to introduce a visual element for the player to realize that the delay is intentional in this particular case. It could be solved by a graphical cursor on the screen, perhaps with a faded blur tracing it as the character aims around. The trace behind the cursor would obviously have to be minimal in order for it to not obstruct the players view and be an annoyance instead of attempting to prevent it.

The other part of the problem is that the speed is fading, this issue is far easier to fix, and may even be the largest cause for the issue at hand. The fix is, to simply stop the speed falloff/braking effect and have the character to continuously move until it hits, say… a wall or some other solid object.

If, we wished to keep the speed falloff, it could be entirely possible by introducing visual elements for a reason the speed is decreasing, such as automatic thrusters on the front of the character whose purpose is to brake the speed. It’s all about creating suspension for disbelief, and compromises in design will always have be done.(That is why you rarely see 100% physically accurate games, unless that is the intended goal for the game)

Hopefully this new movement system will be implemented before the beta release of the game.

Have a great week/weekend!

Morgan out!

Next week’s topic, if all goes well, will be about unifying art assets produced by multiple artists!

And here is a preview(Have fun attempting to guess what it is supposed to be out of context):