Blog Post 2 – Movement
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Hello! Time for another blog post. In this post I will talk about player movement in our game. The player controls the movement with the WASD buttons. W and S are for thrust, D and A are for rotation. The player is a boat and the player can traverse the level any direction. These are the two most important things when it comes to the player movement in our game. The problem that I currently have is that the movement and the perspective are very hard to fit together. At the moment our boat is drawn in a true top-down, but the rest of the level is drawn in a 45° angle. This makes everything in the level look wrong when the boat is right next to it. We have gone through a couple of things that might solve this problem but so far, we have not come up with anything that will keep the realistic boat movement and the nice perspective.
The first solution we had was to make the movement 8-directional and have a different sprite for each direction. This would make everything look good with the perspective but the biggest problem there is that the movement will feel very wrong and not feel like a boat at all. Another solution we have is to keep the same movement system as we have now but once the boat hits certain angles in rotation the boat will swap to a sprite that fits that angle. This seems like the best solution but the problem we have with this is that it might look weird in between these angle points. The boat will travel one direction and the boat sprite will not always point at the direction the boat is heading. We are unsure on how we will solve this and in the end it will come down what the programmer and artist can manage. Movement is one of the most important parts in a game like this when moving around the level is core to the game. If the player does not like the feel or the look of the boat when they play, there is no reason for them to keep playing. The boat is always in the center of the screen and the center of attention at many times. It is vital that it feels good.  |
