Flight of the Bees
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Hello again! Fredrik here again and this week I have mostly worked on how to make the movement in our game feel better. This is because, based on the feedback we got from the alpha testing, we decided during a sprint planning meeting that the current movement we had was very lackluster. From the testers we had some people saying that our player could have been anything else and it would still have made as much sense as a bee from a ”Game Feel” standpoint. This was very valid feedback since our movement had been a placeholder since the start of the project but we really never actually thought that much about it. The movement we had was just moving the player avatar with a set amount when the button was held down, so it felt pretty much like dragging a box across the floor, but it wasn’t something that we as a group thought that much about since we were so used to it.  Since the movement is something that is extremely important to the experience of the player we decided that I had to redesign it. I started out thinking that I would use the in-game tools that unity provides to simulate physics. I wanted to do this because in the sprint-planning we decided that I would try to implement a first iteration of the movement overhaul during the first half of the week so the group would be able to give me feedback on it. This was because we had yet to decide on the specifics of how the movement was going to work which made me want to cut corners to save time. After playing around with it I quickly realized though that I was not really happy with that system because there were too many things that were not that accessible to customize the movement the way that we wanted. Because of this, I decided to make my own system which is based on acceleration and max velocity and having the velocity be decreased constantly while there are no inputs. It didn’t take very long and is fairly rudimentary but the results are pretty positive if I dare say so myself. It’s not perfect by any means but it just goes to show that a simple solution can sometimes have a big impact.  In conclusion, there are probably problems in your project that might not be seen by yourself if you are making it because you are so used to playtesting it yourself. The solution to this is, as many before I have said, to playtest with people outside the development group. It’s nothing revolutionary but the reason for it might be something that one has to discover for themselves, at least that was the case for me.  |