Day Seven
Well, here we are at the end of week one. I'm a little sad not to be where I hoped with all gameplay elements finished, but that was a pretty lofty goal as I was learning everything as I did it, and especially considering how little time I had to work this past week. That said, I'm actually feeling pretty good about things. Today, after hours of trial and error and lots of being sure I knew what would work and being proven wrong, I finally fixed my wall jump! Now you can hold towards the wall and jump, or you can hold away from it and you get a small window where you can still jump before you fall, and you always jump away from the wall instead of occasionally jumping towards it.
Somehow the raycast that checks if the player is next to and facing a wall was returning true for about one frame even if the player was next to the wall but facing the other direction. Since I use the raycast in combination with the player's facing direction to set the wall jump direction, when this happened the player would jump towards the wall instead of away from it. I tried so many things to fix it with no success (or fixing it but creating a worse problem) but in the end what seems to have done it is an additional boolean touchedWall stacked on top of the regular isTouchingWall one. I tried it sure it wouldn't work, but there we were. It was exciting to have it working, but a little exasperating to not really understand why.
Okay, moving on. Today I made a list of all the things I wanted to have done by the end of the first week and actually cranked through most of it. I tweaked my regular jump to have a bit more weight when descending, added a killzone for player death, set up respawning, built a halfway functioning title screen, and added the ability to pause the game with a placeholder pause screen. Most importantly, I fully implemented my main mechanic of world changing! Now I have a basic default world, one alternate on one button, another on another button, and a void world if you hold both. Here it is in action (sorry for the visual downgrade for prototyping):
I would like to figure out how to make the camera stop centering on the player when you get towards the edge of the level, but I don't have any idea how, so I'll have to see if I can find a tutorial or something that lets me do that. If not I suppose I can block in tons of plain ground tiles in all directions.
Not too much left in the gameplay department other than building my levels and setting up goals and scene changing between them. Looking over my dev plan I totally forgot about collectibles, and honestly I'm not sure if I'm going to mess with them at all. I guess it'll depend on how much time I end up with, and the same goes for my secret feature, which was always planned as a maybe in the first place. Excited to start throwing some art design ideas around soon, and to put together some music too. I have a pretty clear vision for how I want the music to be, but essentially no idea how audio works in Unity yet, so we'll see how close I get.