DevLog #1 - Movement

This first devlog will cover the development, issues and feedback relating to character movement, collisions and shooting

Character Movement

For movement inside the world, I opted for the standard ‘WASD’ for caracter movement. The keys controlling forwards, backwards and sideways movement. Arrow key movement or pointing and clicking using mouse buttons would have both worked instead of ‘WASD’, though those movement controls wouldn’t have complimented the rest of the game or other controls too well. 

If the base movement speed for a walking state isn't fast enough for the player or if the objective is escaping. A sprinting feature is enabled in the game through the use of the Left Shift button. The use of sprinting gives a 1.8x speed increase to the player, substantially increasing their movement speed whenever it is needed. For testing, the sprinting state also temporarily changes the player sprite colour to blue from white, to give a visual representation that it does in fact work.

Character Sprite & Animation

The circle seen in the gifs and test build are a placeholder for the sprite that will be used as the final result. Out of all the 2D shapes available inside of Unity, I found the circle to be the best placeholder, as the player sprite will fit comfortably inside of it and the collider can be modified accordingly without creating too many issues.

Character Collision

The players collision with the world I've tested through two methods.

The first method being against the placeholder red walls. In the test build, they act as a boundary for the level  and test the player movement and collision. These will be further implemented as invisible walls to block the player from exiting the map through the walls and for keeping the player isolated within the confines of the level.

The second method being an obstacle course made up of a handful of different shapes. Each shape with its own collider and rigidbody to properly test how the player will interact and move against barrels, crates and other objects in the final build of the game. I found this a worthwhile way to see how the colliders react and how much, if any distance is between the colliding objects in-game.

Peer Feedback

Regarding peer feedback, below is the standout feedback and responses to it.

Pkayer Movement:

movement is working and so is the sprint system.

Dash, movement, colliders seem fine.

General feedback regarding movement was that it worked and was fine, colliders worked well and no issues or problems regarding that or the movement speed.

Also you can sort of clip into the corners of walls if you ram yourself into them

One peer picked up on the fact that clipping into walls was an issue if sprinting at the right time and angle, which was a very good observation. As myself and other peers had not picked up on this yet. Try setting collision detection to continuous on the rigid body if you haven't already, that fixed that issue for me. This was a correct fix which came from another peer, solving a lot of issues which could've risen up later on.

Camera Zoom/Change

The camera zoom level works from 1-5, though G and B didn't appear to work. 

This is 100% my own fault. By this stage I had uploaded a new build to Itch.io and the B + G buttons for incrementing camera size had been removed from the code. Though I had forgotten to remove them as instructions in the description. 

final game, it might be worth making it a notched slider rather than just the preset values but if its just for seeing what people like, 3-4 feels good for me

about 3-4 was an ideal zoom for me

Majority of feedback regarding the camera was that around the 3 to 4 using number keys was the ideal level of zoom and visibility for most peers. With the added feedback of making a notched slider rather than preset values. I had touched upon this a bit and coded two buttons that change the camera size. Though the buttons do increment it, they're not set values and just increases and lowers it by 1. With a maximum size of 8 and minimum size of 2. With 3 to 4 being a size of 6 to 7 being the most ideal and favourite size.

Shooting:

The shooting system worked but only seemingly went around in a circular direction each time you shoot, I assume it comes off of a child object that is in constant rotation?

shooting is a bit weird

but at some stage the player just started shooting in a straight line and then it stayed fixed that way

The feedback regarding shooting was just as I had anticipated. The early implementation of it is what you could call rough. Where the direction the player faces doesn't seem to matter as when you move the shooting is erratic and irrational. One peer did call out the possible problem quite quickly though, with the shooting coming off a child object, which my player is. 

Early on I experimented with creating a placeholder character out of multiple sprites all linked together under an empty parent game object to control it, though the results were poor so I scrapped it, but kept it was a child object. Which is what caused this shooting issue.

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