Zshandi / ScalingPuzzler

Scaling Puzzler game for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam
0 stars 0 forks source link

Improve movement and jump/lift mechanic #50

Closed Zshandi closed 1 month ago

Zshandi commented 2 months ago

Based on feedback from the jam, as well as my own experience with it, the jumping could be better.

How the jumping currently works was intended to emulate how it felt when the controls were still to move the level rather than the player. If the player tries to move in the upward direction, there is additional force applied (only upward though). This force gradually decreases after leaving the ground until reaching 0, at which point they need to return to the ground to restore it.

This is flawed in several ways:

  1. It doesn't give any indication to the player how long is left in the jump
  2. It isn't intuitive that it gradually decreases over time, as there aren't many real world analogs which behave this way
  3. Most people are used to jumping with a single impulse rather than force
  4. It's easy to accidentally start the jump earlier than intended with a very small starting force (when it counts the most)

There are several ways in which we could fix this:

A: Add visual indicators of lift remaining, as well as making it a constant force rather than gradually decreasing so it's more intuitive B: Replace the lift (and possibly movement altogether) with a mechanic that resembles jumping. What I'm thinking is something similar to the mechanic in Ori where you can launch yourself off of some objects like lanterns. C: Remove movement altogether, and only rely on scaling and rotation to move the ball around.

To start, I think I'll make a way to easily separate controller code, and move the different pieces to that code.

Zshandi commented 2 months ago

@dumbanode I'm thinking that maybe it would be good to just remove movement altogether, and focus only on the scaling and rotation. We could also play around with still having a limited jumping mechanic, but I think that having more limited movement will make for more interesting puzzles and challenges. What do you think?