Week 8—Player Movement

A browser game made in HTML5

Posted September 12, 2021 by WillBruce

Player Movement

This is the first devlog for my upcoming game for KIT109, this week focusing mainly on basic player movement.

Movement so far...

So far with basic movement I have implemented the ability to simply go side-to-side which is really all it needs, the main feature was always going to be mini-games which will all need a different way to control.

The arm

As [Prosaic Ware] has movement but is still mostly point and click I needed a way to limit the range of the player, I first thought I'd do this simply through limiting the objects the player could interact with when far away but I thought a better way would be through a visual representation of this. Hence the arm;

This is a fundamental demonstration this concept but I believe it coveys the point, an arm that follows the mouse and shows the radius of intractable objects, in future I would like to obviously add something more than a white rectangle but besides that I would like to add some physics to the arm so it bends and contorts depending on how close or far away the mouse is from the player.

Mini-game Access

Unlike a lot of other games I've seen so far [Prosaic War] is less about movement as a whole but more about the puzzle games that scatter the over world, so an important factor of this games development is the way these mini-games are accessed. As discussed above the player has a certain to interact with objects so the way these games will the accesses is by clicking on objects with the 'hand'. What this also includes is the transition from one camera to another, I've so far implemented a camera fade effect to make the change less abrupt but I plan to do more effects such as a title screen or quick passed instructions of the mini-game. To do this however I need to implement some mini-games.

Right now the arm interacting with objects doesn't do anything yet, but the gif above shows an approximation of what it should look like. By clicking the microwave a mini-game with no functionality is faded into, there's no current way to exist a mini-game as it has no timer or exit button.