Third Devlog for "Escape from the M'lon Factory!"

(We are using headings now! Yippee!)

Weekly again, week 3 here we go.

Now, still a lot under the hood! I promise soon that some visuals will give some more pizazz. Let's get into it.

This week was troublesome I had to follow some forum posts and tutorials. But still, this is a shorter one as we are improving the basics. This week's task was mostly further refinements, development and death!

Changes and Additions!

(see the small change list for a complete summary)

First off, I did some basic quality-of-life stuff. The character can't fly off the map and disappear into the unending void. How did we do this? I first added some invisible collision walls, paired with the camera that way they stay on point.

(It's also very big, to make sure the player doesn't disappear into it.)

Now the second change is the meaty bit, I wanted to make it so, the character reached a fixed speed when moving up down or across, to implement this, I had a few ideas, one was to cap the player velocity, but this left some wacky scenarios were the play would feel like it would snap into the final speed, I consulted the internet and came across a forum post that an interesting solution, which also let me set the max velocity on the fly, and would slow the speed down massively making it so, it would always hover around the max speed. (cherub, 2010) Thank you cherub for the idea even if you gave the solution 14 years ago!

The tweaked movement in action.


Third, I made a small change to the player, so they always stay upright in the world, this makes sure all interactions work as intended, as we don't need the character falling over sideways. (I did this by freezing the z-axis rotation! (for unity buffs))

Fourth, I refined how the spawner works, making it so obstacles do not clip into the floor and roof, and are a bit more evenly split in the game world!

Fifth, I made it so the player now moves back to the end of the map if they have stopped inputting to move right, this keeps them from accidentally getting clobbered by an off-screen obstacle. I struggled to implement this but I found the issue! I was using a unity method called Oncollision2DEnter, which would only check once! This isn't good because it wouldn't provide the constant backwards. I changed this method to On collision 2Dstay which checks for the enter duration of the collision.

Sixth, I've been noticing that the Unity editor version and the itch build the gameplay very differently in terms of speed and physics, I was very concerned about why, but I think I figured it out, I was using the update function which in the editor provided smooth gameplay, but it is called once per frame, so my pc was producing a large amount of frames,  so lots of calls, but on the itch build the frames are clamped so this produces less physics in the same time. By transferring to FixedUpdate I was able to make it so both experiences were much more consistent.

Seventh, Player Death! Players now die when hitting an obstacle. (Try this out!)

https://ee3eee.itch.io/kit109-game-project-escape-from-the-mlon-factory (Play and see.)

Full Changes List:

1. Made Collision Walls to prevent players from falling out of the world.
2. Added max speed for the player, preventing them from reaching unintended massive speeds.
3. Locked Player Z-Axis to prevent certain physics interactions.
4. Refined spawner spawn range, to be within world bounds.
5. The player now slowly moves backward to the start position.
6. Changed physics over to FixedUpdate rather than Update.
7. Player can die.

Feedback:

Unfortunately during the peer review for this week, Itch was down, so I couldn't get hands-on feedback, I did showcase it and got a little feedback.

1. Looks very smooth!
2. Could use some variety of enemies to break it up.
3. Some visuals would be nice to break up the solid white.

What's next?

Next Week, I plan to implement the changes that meet the feedback, expect some new enemies and some visuals, although these might be minor. I'm thinking, missiles and rotating enemies, and I'm thinking let's put some placeholder sprites in! As well as continued adjustments.
Thanks for your support!

References:

cherub. (2010). Limiting rigidbody velocity - questions & answers - unity discussions. Retrieved from https://discussions.unity.com/t/limiting-rigidbody-velocity/952