BGP Week 6 – Puff and Cutting it
|
For most of this week, I worked on another new platforming challenge, the puff shroom. The concept was quite simple: If the player stood close to it, after a set time limit it would explode and fire the player away from it. The design idea was for it to be used both to get the player away from locations or down from ledges if they were too slow, but also as a short-cut for those skilled enough to utilize the gained force. At first, it did not seem that tricky. We already had bounce shrooms, so for the force the basics needed were just to use that same kind of mechanic to fire away the player, just instead of it going straight up, have it angled based on the angle between the puff shroom and the player. To that I just needed to use code similar to the timer I used for the Venus Slimetrap to calculate the delay. Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and once I had all of this working, I ran into an unexpected issue. As part of our movement code, the player, while on the ground, ran a clamping script to make sure it remained on a surface rather than falling through it. This was an essential part of our movement system. The issue was that, if the player was on the ground when the puff exploded, the claming cancelled out any upward momentum, causing the player to just slide along on the ground. This was a pretty major issue, and one, given the limited time left, finally led to the decision to cut the puff shrooms from the product for now rather than spend more of the programmers time on something we were unsure how to solve easily.  |