Progress Update: Momentum Movement

Hey all!

I'm back with another progress update. This time we'll primarily be focusing on movement. This update ended up being long, so I've decided to split off the fighting-related stuff and I'll be doing another update around the coming weekend, because otherwise it'd be a bit too long.

The first thing I want to mention is: since I've doubled down on the fighting system changes, it means any Spooky changes and releases have been pushed back. If you're waiting for that, I recommend that you downgrade your support tier while you wait, unless you're still comfortable with supporting me in the higher tiers.

Movement changes

I've made some changes to the way the player moves so that hopefully it's a bit more in-depth and fun.

The player can now floor slide to get a small speed boost and to get through smaller gaps. I've made a static sprite for this so far while I play around with it, but the plan is it becomes a fuller animation later on. It also gives you a bigger speed boost on downward slopes (and vice versa upslope).

In conjunction with sliding, you now keep your momentum way more while airborne. This means you can do things like slide jump to go faster, but I've had to reduce how much control you have while airborne since otherwise you do full stops after going at mach 10. But in general, I want to make movement be more momentum-based because it just feels more fun.

To make momentum and travel more visible I've added a pink movement trail to the player - the faster you go, the longer the trail, which makes speed easier to read. It should also help with noticing moving platforms (but that is its own problem).

The new 144px tall jump animation is now a static sprite, and will also become a fuller animation later. I've also noticeably reduced the jump height to make fighting something that's a bit harder to avoid, but you'll get things to make up for that later down the line.

All the shelf platforms are now way easier to drop down from. Before there was no guarantee that you'd fall through - it didn't always work and that was frustrating. Now it only needs you to hold Down (instead of Down+Jump), it's a toggle (hold to fall through multiple layers), and it works consistently (as long as you're actually on a shelf platform). I've also made many walls that are part of shelves passthrough-able too, so you don't bump into them anymore while dropping down.

The player now snaps up a few pixels when just barely missing a platform when jumping up - it doesn't feel good to just barely miss a platform, so now that is a bit more lenient.

I've also added ledge climbing so you can get up walls that are too tall for jumps. I want to see if I can add a wall slide too, so you can use walls to quickly change directions and jump more diagonally (rather than up) and do platforming in new ways using walls, but wall sliding isn't something I've started experimenting with yet nor do I have a sprite drawn for that yet - so that is the next thing I'll be doing (probably).

All of this means level design changes as things are changing pretty drastically gameplay-wise now. I might just remake the Jungle map entirely, with e.g. a start area that acts much better as a tutorial, before you reach the first village.

I'm also planning to make some camera movement changes again since the old system wasn't all that great but with all these movement changes it's showing even more, so at some point I'll try playing around with less movement (e.g. when jumping), better lookahead in the direction you're moving (so you can see more of the world ahead), and maybe a placement system (think Hollow Knight where the camera stops at world borders, auto-peeks down on ledges, and things like that).

Spooky

I did take a small break from fighting and movement to work on the upcoming Spooky stuff, and I worked a bit on the vampire manor. I added a bathroom with a sink, toilet, bathtub, and towel rack. The aim, as stated before, is to make the vampire manor dense with rooms and interactable things - the toilet makes a flush noise, for example, but ideally the bathroom (like many other rooms) should somehow help you progress part of the small puzzle quest that will take place in the manor. I've also begun working on a kitchen as well, with a cooker, counter top, cupboards, and so on. It's not much, but the other stuff takes priority right now.

The rest

I've also changed abilities so that they're dropped rather than given automatically. This makes it clearer that entities give you something, and they make it optional - you're not forced to pick up their ability, but it's there. I'm hoping to do the same with money and/or EXP too - a visual indicator that you pick things up, but these will be automatic.

The chunk loading optimization I mentioned previously now works, which means a nice speedup in general. I've also been testing the game on Android as I've been making more and more optimizations, and things are improving, but there is a hard crash that I still don't know why is happening. The crash is probably the main and only hard blocker to Android builds, but it's a completely different beast of a bug than usual so I don't expect to deal with it anytime soon.

Outside of gamedev, I had a few days where I couldn't work on the game because the PC died, which was worrying... but it turned out to just be the power supply and not something worse like the motherboard. I've been keeping backups so no worries there, it was just a pause to the development for a bit.

Well, that's it for this one. The coming weekend I should post another progress update that focuses on fighting, I've got a lot of stuff here already and after this week I should have even more. See you then!