Please provide feedback and suggestions here.
Hi there, I made a list below of some things I'd personally like to see in the game, along with a bug. Practically all of the things I've mentioned are to do with quality / feel of game mechanics instead of the adding anything new, as I feel I'm not familiar enough with platformers to give suggestions for features. Anyway, I still hope this helps with further development.
NOTE: I've included a solutions section which contains possible changes to satisfy NEARLY all suggestions and fix all bugs mentioned below. I can also help with most of these if you want to implement any of them but are unsure exactly how to, just dm @HyperAzpect.
Suggestions:
- Add Movement acceleration instead of binary moving / standing still.
This means that the player should take some time to reach max speed once they start moving. It also involves taking a bit of time to fully turn around the player's velocity when the they change direction while moving, and maybe even taking some time to stop moving they stop pressing WASD.
- New mechanics
I know I said I wouldn't suggest adding anything specific, but I still think there should be more mechanics in the game, whether it would make it more fun to play or change it to make the game more unique.
- Some camera lag / delay on x axis
It's already done on the y axis, and although it's personal ofc I feel like it would look smoother to have it done on both, even if in small amounts for the x.
- Game feel
Maybe making mechanics feel better to use? Expanded upon in the solutions section.
Bugs:
- Being crushed by the platform on level 4 makes you clip into the level.
Solutions to suggestions / bugs:
- Movement acceleration implementation
The easiest way to do movement acceleration would probably be converting the player movement to be physics-based (if it's not already), and use RigidBody2D along with RigidBody2D.AddForce() calls to drive movement. This has the added benefit of also giving deceleration, so it takes some time for the player to stop moving.
- Being crushed possible fixes
To avoid the player clipping into the level when being crushed by the platform you could just straight up kill them, shift them to the side / on top if they're about to be crushed or even just have the player block the platform's movement so it doesn't make them clip.
- Game feel
There's a huge amount of stuff you could do to make the game "feel better to play", but some more common ones include more camera shake, changing fov, playing with scale in animations, sounds, particles / vfx for events like jumping on a "jump-pad" and more. There's a TON of stuff on game feel online so if you'd like to find out more about I would search it up. I am still aware that this is really early development though, so I wouldn't focus too much on this if you decide to take it as a suggestion since other things should probably be higher priority, and you don't want to make something feel polished and then realise it should be removed later.
Overall, there is more stuff I would suggest to do with the game, but I feel like these are more of the higher priority suggestions I have. I've also avoided topics like art since I'm terrible at it, and wouldn't really know what to advise for that.
Anyway, nice game so far and I hope this post helps with development further!