itch.io

(An addendum) You don't have to read, its more of a note to myself lmao but reminded me....

Actually, thinking about it more, I wanna yap a bit on how the control scheme is why the way it is. (And why it took me a long time to nail down the movement for the player before going into level design).

That was my first thought too, why not implement the very common thing to do in platformers where the player should stop... well...

Blackholes.

1. It gets a bit low on control if it stops the horizontal movement completely, maybe when going through a black hole and you need to slightly slow down the player, so the trajectory makes you move more upward as you give the black hole more time to move up. You can't do that here because the movement is more binary in that you either move too quickly or move too slowly.

2. Even if I came up with a control scheme like that your overall direction changes over time, it gets confusing on how you are meant to "stop" when your horizontal movement became vertical and vice versa. Ex: Going horizontal with D, then it goes upward, I would need to only tap W to stop moving upward... And it gets really inconsistent/unintuitive if the system I did for the horizontal isn't the same as the vertical, which... is hard to work with if you want to prevent the player from getting yeet-smashed down without also preventing levitation....

I knew a boost system was required so that you can escape blackholes. The naturally easy step to solve the issues was... to just slow down the character with a different button, and using the boost system to prevent the player from just levitating for too long. Two systems in one and easy to code.

And from there slingshoting around with maintained momentum while having the control of a slow down was the best idea I had at the time. There might be a better system, but I think this was the only way I could think of that prevented the game from a difficult platformer to a rage game. Or to even release a game to begin with lmao.