The matter of life

Hi, this is my third blog post, in which I’ll be talking about in-game feedback, more specifically, the collision feedback when the player gets hit by an entity that harms the player.

One of the reasons that made me work on this for the beta was all the feedback from everyone that play-tested the game during the alpha playtesting. The playtesters pointed out that there was no way to tell if they were getting hit by something, the health decreased but nothing informed the player that it got hit by something, other than the sound that our main character does.

This week I worked on the main characters health and feedback. First I implemented the hit animation, so each time the player gets hit by an enemy weapon, the hit animation plays. It may seem a simple task but after implementing it, I noticed that it always got overwritten by the other animations since the animation change based on which key you press or release. I changed the hierarchy so the first animation to be played is the hit animation and if it’s not playing the hit animation, the other animations can be played. It worked! I implemented the death animation that our graphic team members did. I played the game a bit and it instantly felt better.

With a complete dark scene, were the player hasto make is way through the village, lighting up the way casting fireballs, it felt a bit unbalanced to have only 5 health. I worked on implementing a health
pick up that would give back some health to the player, so the game wouldn’t feel so punishing. This task was directly related to the hit animation and I wanted to code it in a way that each script did the work it was designed for. For example, the collision would tell the animation to change and the player controller to decrease health. I accomplished this by inheritance, in unity is very simple to use and it worked. Now the collision tells if the player is colliding with a hearth that gives health points back or a harmful entity that decrease the health.

Now that I have it all set up, I tweaking and thinking of how the health pick ups would appear. If they would be spawned after defeating an enemy (rewarding the player for the encounter) or just have it spread out over the map (so the player would try to collect them and still be careful to not encounter any enemy). I have not fund the solution to this issue, the team should playtest it and see what feels better and fairer in for the beta play test.

About Gabriel Andreas Ringmar

2016 Programming

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