Reebo UPDATES #3 (Mechanics)

The initial focus for this trimester was polishing the Player character mechanics. After some play testing and comparing with other 3d platformer games, most of the flaws were highlighted and clear to us. The major mechanic to polish first was the Player Movement, since we were using the default Player controller, it still had the default settings that needed to be tweaked. 

One of the mechanics really flawed was the jump and double jump. It wasn’t that it was not working, it worked but it had really floaty feel to it. So to fix it we increased the jump velocity, player gravity, and player mass, which allowed the player to fall quickly to the ground rather than floating like in Moon.

 After the Jump was fixed we started focusing on the “Arm stretch and grab” mechanic. To begin with, this was not a planned mechanic, this was created while creating a different mechanic, the slingshot mechanic. While trying to get ideas on how to create a slingshot mechanic, I started looking around for ideas and ways to do it. I was playing around with adding a magnet to Reebo which will pull reebo towards a target, but instead, I ended up pulling objects toward Reebo. And it felt cool and was pitched to the group. Everyone liked it and we decided to keep it to introduce some puzzle elements to the Game. This mechanic needed a lot of polishing. The magnet was on reebo but the reference point was hooked to the camera so it will be pulled to whatever the camera was pointing to. This issue was fixed by creating a new reference point in front of Reebo and attaching the magnet to it. After that there were collision issues with the Pulled object and Reebo, we fixed this by pushing the reference point further away from Reebo and making the crate smaller. 

After this, we started working on a new model for reebo which gave us an opportunity to recreate some basic movements like Running, jumping, and turning. More on this on Animation topic.