Devlog 05 — Train, movement bug fixes, game loop tweaks

Near the start of the project I had the idea for a train that circles the play area. Over the past two weeks, I implemented it! And in doing so, I uncovered a whole bunch of movement bugs. But first, some gifs:

I used Unity's Splines package to draw the train's path. This was my first time using the Splines package, but to my surprise, I got things working very quickly. "Great!," I thought. "I am Studio Ghibli!!!!!"

I then landed on top of the train and promptly slid off. Implementing complex "c'mon just stay on top of the dang freakin train" tech led to a ~1.5 week process of discovering, and fixing, movement bug after movement bug. They were far-ranging — one involving gravity that made going down slopes really bumpy and jerky; one that accidentally made my physics calculations frame-rate dependent; one that resulted in subtly different speed caps depending on which direction you were moving; and lots, lots more. But I fixed them! And the game actually feels much better.

I also revisited the end-game "time trial." As a reminder, once the player discovers all 7 "things" (not sure what they'll be yet) scattered across the islands and marks them on their mini-map, they'll have to visit them within a time limit in a certain order in order to complete the game. I updated the logic to no longer mandate exactly which location the player starts the time trial from; they can choose, and they'll need to do one lap from that spot.

I also changed how the timer works: instead of being a fixed 60 seconds, it now depends on how many of a new collectible the player has obtained. Right now, the timer starts with no time and each collectible adds two seconds, visualized as an expanding bar across the bottom of the screen. I'm planning to use these collectibles to encourage and reward exploration. And hopefully, they'll provide an interesting dynamic for players who want to speed-run the game, since those players will need to pick up enough to cover the time trial, but the more time they spend picking up collectibles and building their safety net, the longer their overall time will be. Players not interested in speed-running can just grab as many collectibles as they'd like. And if they fail the time trial, they can comfortably collect more, grow the bar, and try again.

Also since the last post, I rearranged the island placement. I'll definitely need to iterate on it further. Although this started out as a game about falling, I realized that it's actually not fun to fall for too long at a time. And once you've landed on an island, it's not a lot of fun to run around on it for more than a few seconds. So I think the general direction for the next pass will be more islands, all smaller, and all closer together.

Finally, I did a few other things since the last devlog:

• added a compass on the X and Z axes pointing to the next destination during the time trial,
• added a chromatic aberration post-processing effect while you're using your phase move,
• added fog that gets applied to the lighting settings while you're on the spooky graveyard island (visible in the third gif), and
• removed the low-resolution art style I introduced in the previous devlog, since the most striking thing visually about the game currently is (and will probably remain) the backdrop of slowly-undulating clouds, and rendering at a lower resolution diminishes its impact.

The next couple of things on my roadmap are:

• playing with the progression, mainly making the game more gated at the start so it feels like it opens up as you collect movement upgrades, release the debris, start the train, etc.,
• doing another pass on the moveset to make it more balanced and encourage chaining together moves,
• doing another pass at island layout with the above learnings in mind, and
• controller support!

Until next time — thanks for reading, and bye bye!!!