Devlog 02 — Movement tech

Since the last devlog, I built out the player moveset! As this is a game about falling, I want the player to have some control while in the air, but not as much as while grounded. Over time, the player will pick up more moves and feel more mastery in the air.

Here's what I've implemented:

• Different acceleration and deceleration rates while on ground vs. in the air.
• A horizontal dash, with different speeds in ground vs. in the air.
• A long-jump when jumping out of a ground dash.
• An air-jump, mainly useful for when you're falling really quickly and want to regain some control, as it resets your Y velocity.
• A dive, accelerating your fall to the highest possible speed. You must be facing downward, and you lose some horizontal movement control while diving. This is useful when you've missed the platform you were aiming for and want to loop around back to the top of the loop for another shot, or while trying to catch up with a falling object far below you.
• A "grappling hook," sort of; really, a boost straight in the direction of any valid geometry you click on (including platforms and falling debris I've added to the test level).
• The ability to phase through geometry. This one is useful in conjunction with the grappling hook: if you miss a jump and are falling, face upward and grapple boost toward the bottom of the platform. Then when you're about to make contact, start phasing to pass straight through, conserving your upward momentum. For some extra satisfaction, then face downward and activate your dive to rocket down to the surface of the platform!

I think this is more than enough for the length of game I'm aiming for. It's a lot of fun to dart around the test level, picking out targets to try to land on, and either doing so successfully, or missing and subsequently dashing, grappling, and air jumping to try to salvage your attempt.

So, I think the moveset is mostly complete, aside from tweaking values as I build out the actual level geometry. I also may add some logic around cooldowns and usage resets to encourage chaining together moves, since I recently played Pseudoregalia and my hands just want to chain together moves hehe.

Below is a video of everything in action!

The rest of my roadmap looks like this:

1. program the game flow, adding logic for game start, progression buttons, and game end,
2. add a mini-map (really, just a vertical line docked to the side of the screen that shows the vertical positions of the player and the progression buttons),
3. do a whiteboxing pass,
4. model the geometry in Blender,
5. sounds and music,
6. create the endgame sequence, displaying the player's time and a brief cinematic,
7. polish, polish, polish, polish,
8. bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, 
9. done?

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!