Posted July 29, 2022 by Alex
Hello and welcome to the devlog on my N64 inspired project
I'm taking inspirations from adventure games of yore such as
- Zelda
- Banjo Kazooi
- Spyro
- Crash Bandicoot
I don't want to straight up copy the above games, I want to make something original that mostly focuses on adventure, collectables and narrative. At this stage I'd like it to be fighting free. That doesn't mean there won't be conflict or danger. Just no bopping bad guys
The broad strokes at the moment of where I want the story to go (keep in mind this could change)
A fox (going for the anthropomorphic trend of the time) has responded to a job ad at 'mighty pigeon postage'. Turns out they usually only get pigeons applying for the role. And as such she is met with some confusion. They unfortunately are understaffed and bring her on board. They start her off with the exotic post section and so begins her travels to meet odd people and magical places.
The setting will be somewhat fantasy with modern additions. i.e. the areas are floating islands (want to do this to keep levels segmented) and to travel between is via airship. I do want some backtracking but only to certain 'hub' areas.
I have a lot of ideas on adversities that she will have to overcome to deliver her post and she's nothing but determined.
The character has already been made too, but it's not her final design at this point. A few things I want to touch up as there is so much clipping happening with her skirt.
To traverse the world I am inspired by the OoT style movement. I.e. no actual jump button and contextual traversal. I have already started on this and can show some GIFs.
So currently the movement system looks like this
So what's happening?
I have a dynamic camera that pans out to view the whole animation as I haven't used root motion
Currently, I think it sucks. It takes control away from the player and doesn't work as desired.
----
I'm thinking of redoing
My thoughts are to lerp the z axis only of the impact point of the line trace and the cameras current position, this may lead to a much smoother more predictable solution.
I made the math a little simpler (no more lerps) and just had height of wall/2 + current camera position sets dynamic cameras current position. Additionally, also made the camera track the character.
Small differences
p.s. I saw that the character kind of teleported around on the high climb (fixed now) stuffed up a delay is all.
The camera is relatively dynamic and apart from a mid height wall grab got most ranges covered. This camera system would also work for sidescroller sections or a tracking fixed camera similar to when Link goes into houses in OoT.
I would like to change a few things regarding forwards jump height as currently can only be done if on the same plane. I also need to fix up some checks on overhead detection so she doesn't accidently jump into boxes or spaces that are too small.
I hope you're excited to see how it pans out