Week 4 - Movement Abilities Prototype

Hi, everybody
This week we worked independently on prototypes.

Mine's purpose was to develop a variety of movement abilities, to see which ones would work. On top of what we already had (see last week's post), I added:

• A Wall Jump, which affords more vertical movement options, giving us more tools to develop levels;
• A Grappling Hook, which would give us variety in horizontal movement;
• Running, which activates automatically after the player walks in any direction for a fixed short amount of time.

Some improvements were made to the abilities that already existed, particularly to the jump, like not allowing the second jump to come out immediately after the first, which made it easier for the player to get the best use out of it.

For the sake of not overwhelming the player with such an array of abilities, the dash, double jump, wall jump and grappling hook were made into unlockables, spread throughout a test level, which gave the player the opportunity to test those abilities in a wide variety of scenarios. It also gave me the opportunity to try my hand at a more open type of level design.

Here you can see all the abilities in action:

From testing the following major problems were identified:

• The key bindings are not intuitive nor comfortable. Particularly for the Grappling Hook, which should have been bound to a mouse button, but the others could be better as well.
• Jump height could be dependent on how long the key is held, and that path will be explored.
• The wall jump should require the player to be actively moving towards the wall to activate, so that the player can better control between a wall jump and a double jump