Movement Devlog

The movement of Red’s Daring Rescue is intuitive and smooth. The vertical looping is nicely complimented by the controls and the ability to change direction in the air. Maintaining momentum in the air also means that infinitely looping is a lot harder. In future, a feature will be implemented where if a player is travelling too fast (from falling for too long like when infinitely looping) they will respawn but that hasn’t been started yet. Other than this the looping is smooth, instant, and so far does not result in any complications.

Wall climbing has been added on top of the movement mentioned in the concept development log. This started as an unforeseen bug in how moving left and right on a wall interacted with friction but has now been implemented intentionally with controls for climbing up and down. The player now sticks to walls (not roofs) to hint to new players the ability to climb up and down.

The picture above is the player sticking to a wall.

The player also slowly slips down when sticking to a wall stopping players from endlessly clinging to wall with no input and mean that a player will eventually be able to find themselves if they lose track of their position when looping.

At first there were some issues surrounding jumping mainly how it collided with the wall climbing feature meaning the player couldn’t climb and the fact that jumps acted like charges, you were able to jump once between each touch of a platform regardless of whether you were still touching it. These, and a few other bugs, have all been fixed by having the jumping only work while touching a platform and the players ‘jump’ not truly be a jump; the players vertical velocity is adjusted instead. Now jumping works exactly the same as wall climbing just over a very small period of time.

There is still a small bug left in the movement, when landing the players sprite dips into the ground. Sometimes this is more noticeable than others and from testing it seems this only happens when landing on the ground and not when sticking to walls. Also from testing, this seems to be purely a visual bug. A possible fix could be to set the players vertical velocity to zero on collision with the ground but so far nothing has been implemented to try and fix this.

The picture above is an example of the dipping issue.

The player, though they get to max horizontal speed instantly, takes time to slow down. This is down through the physics engine through the use of friction. However, because friction is used for slowing the player, when they land from a jump there is increased force down on the ground, so friction is much larger meaning the player stops horizontally instantly. In real life friction is proportional to the force it is putting on the ground so it’s weight plus momentum; this is what Unity is recreating. So far, I have no thoughts on how this issue may be solved so that all horizontal speed slows at the same rate. 

The penultimate implementation of player movement had not accounted for two players colliding with each other. This has been solved in the most recent by having collisions between the two players be ignore like they are in most multiplayer games.

 The picture above is of player 1 and player 2 overlapping showing collisions between them are off. 

Also in the most recent implementation of player movement, is an ease of life feature for the creation of two player gameplay and allows the possibility of more players. The control keys have been set as variables so a new script for movement is not needed for each player. This does not affect play at all.