Thank you for playing my game.
I didn't expect the air dash to be a consistent problem. It's hard for me to tell what the difficulty here is exactly, but I would assume it was either one or a combination of:
- It being unclear that you dash in the direction you're aiming, meaning looking straight up in the air and then dashing will give you the most amount of height. I don’t think the ability description says anything about this though, I kinda expected people to just figure it out 😅
- The force provided by the air dash does not replace your prior velocity, but instead combines with a fraction of that velocity. So if you're already falling at an extremely speed for instance, you're not going to be able to gain any height at all even if you aim straight up. The reasoning behind this was that I found it felt more natural if you already had a lot of momentum when you sprint and then jump or when you launch yourself with the grapple, but I suppose it might not be immediately obvious that it works that way.
Originally, the “orange element” was going to have a double jump instead of air dash, which also would’ve been easier to use, but I found the air dash to be more fun so that’s what I went with.
I did struggle a bit with the grapple’s collision during testing, but I never thought much of it in part because there was so much else that I needed to get done. I’ll be looking into making it easier to use.
With the hit sounds, my thinking with that was based on the Metroid Prime games; or, rather, what I remember from those games. As it turns out, those games had more indicators that you were taking damage than I remember, and even the indicators I did recall didn’t work exactly the way I remembered either. I’ll definitely be taking that into account.