Borders Game Dev Log

Ciaran Farrelly, C23398721

When given the theme of “border” David, Sean and I began brainstorming around the idea of borders between different realities which would lead our visual and gameplay design and concept building throughout the initial storming phases. We settled on a concept based around imaginary realities which the player would move through We felt that a platformer puzzle game would be the best way to represent this concept. In this regard, the player would flip back and forth between these realities through a multitude of ways, either through a timer, by pressing a lever or a key on their keyboards. In doing so, they would reveal new areas of the map, and new interactions which would allow them to easily solve the puzzles at hand and complete the task to move on to the next level.

My task within the group was to be the lead programmer and to handle any coding issues that arose within the game. My initial task was to build a character controller for the player, which I wanted to feel responsive and fluid. Much of these platformer controls were based around the game Celeste, where movement was to feel snappy and clean, allowing the player to traverse the puzzles in front of them without the movement feeling like it was getting in the way. To achieve this, an adjustable character controller would have to be used, which could be easily altered so that the right feel could be gained. As such all the attributes can be edited straight from the inspector window on unity. These attributes included how much gravity would scale on the descent, what the max fall speed would be before clamping kicked in, how much time the player would have after leaving a platform where they could still jump, etc. I feel like through these efforts we got very close to intended effect, and we are very happy with where the games movement is right now.

The next task was to create the switching realities mechanic. Initially for this we wanted to use three different ways to swap between realities, starting with where the player was forced to swap every seven seconds. This had to be cut as we were having trouble with the numerator functions in unity and running out of time, we opted to scrap it and only have two mechanisms. These were to be where you would on the first two levels, must go up to manual switches with colliders, which, when flicked, would disable some of the onscreen sprites, and enable others, along with their colliders. This worked well we felt, and we had no complaints and kept it in. Finally, there was to be the option to swap by pressing the F key on the keyboard, this was a simple translation of the switch script but instead of it being triggered by a collider, its triggered by a key press.

Overall the project went well and progressed pretty seamlessly over the weeks outside of the timer functions, however given the time, there are some animations that weren’t implemented very well and I’d probably like to take the time to go back and fix.