Video
Feature List
Wall Jumping is too hard (requiring major tilts where you can’t even see the screen)
ropeHook deployment is awkward as it requires aiming whilst others require taps anywhere
Landing on platforms is hard, a simple element made much more interesting due to the accelerometer (the tutorial itself can be too hard!)
I also had an issue with using the playerSpikes and the Fall Damage, if the player fell past y velocity of 15 (which then ticks the fatalFall boolean) but then proceeds to attach to the wall and then jump to a platform they still die as the boolean is still true. To avert this I added a fatalFall = false; to the player whenever they attach to the wall using the playerSpikes.
The other major tweak I did was to remove the spawning system (for now). As the level is short (1~ minute long) and that powerUps don’t regenerate it proved an issue when playtesting with people who died often. If I had longer levels (which I guess would go against the short-playtime ethos of the game) I would implement it back in but for now it can be shelved.
Major changes from last time include floating tutorial text and tweaked placement of platforms and obstacles from playtesting feedback for better gameflow.
My level didn’t actually have a initial plan but was something born naturally from making areas to test specific abilities as I made them as well as taking inspiration from tutorial objectives seen in my old level designs.
In other videos the upper encounter had a sideways spike but that was removed as it was to severe a punishment after playesting with newbies.
If you compare it to previous videos you can recall that these platforms used to be floating ones but I added pillars to the latest version to 1. change the look and add a ‘source’ for the floating platforms and 2. to allow the player to recover by climbing up by spikes if need be.
After some playtesting the pillar was widened a bit to be more forgiving.
Changes/Tweaks
After following tutorials I had an initial version that essentially just showed the elapsed time, but today I revised that to be an actual timeLimit that counts down instead.
The biggest issue came from doing a Pause Menu, for that I had to look up how to stop time which is done via Time.timeScale.
The tutorial I followed used a tag based system where all objects for the Paused Menu were under the tag “UI_Pause” and it would just activate/deactivate all objects in an array of that tag (akin to me activating/deactivating powerup gameobjects seen in Entry 11).
This didn’t work for me for some reason so I ended up doing a workaround – the UI objects relating to Pause would be instead be stored as children to a ‘Pause’ gameobject which would be activated/deactivated instead.
Now the backpack and the parachute are independent, with the backpack appearing at all times and the chute itself only when used as expected.
I also decided to modify the height of the parachute, now being a head taller as the previous version was too close to the player in my opinion (chutes are often a distance away, after all).
Sounds done:
The sounds I chose were simplistic and mostly from an 8-bit format which fits the overall art style, each sound was chosen to be noticable so that the player will subconsciously attach certain sounds to certain actions, hopefully making them feel more immersed and in-tune with player movement (which is key for platformers).
All sounds below were sourced sounds and will be referenced in the appropriate documentation.
There’s not much to do to solve this other than to replace long wall sections made up of multiple objects into a singular one.
I’m not so sure on some of the sounds I found (namely the Parachute) but it’ll have to do for now: the important aspect is the feedback the player now gets: the player should know exactly when they are performing an action, and audio is a part of that.