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XCompWiz4 years ago

Is there is supposed to be more to it than the jump prototype demo?

Depleting your health doesn't do anything, and controlling the character is tricky. Not much else to do that I found.

For the wall jumps, consider coyote time. At the moment trying to move away as you jump often results in no jump. For the moment, don't give the player so much inertia. Try checking out the movement mechanics in Celeste; they talk about what they did and how they did it in various places. :)

After bouncing around and things, the character seemed to still have some basic inertia going on, so he would move a little every second. Purely velocity-driven movement works best in a space or highly physics-based game, but not a standard platformer. At the very least, you probably want to introduce damping into your velocity. :)

I'd be interested in hearing what your team learned during this jam, if you'd be willing to share. :)

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MadQueenSaph4 years ago(+1)

Thank you for the feedback!  While we had originally planned to put more things in (attacking, enemies, etc.), personal life got in the way a bit, so I apologize for the lack of features.  I do believe I could have made the wall jump feature better, maybe with a wall cling or something alike.  I normally don't use physics so the game suffers from my lack of experience with using them, and it probably doesn't help that I manually made the mechanics when the engine has them built-in.  One of the good things I got out of this jam was that I finally set up a input system I'm happy with, and I haven't messed with menus before, so I learned from that as well.

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LilSandvich4 years ago (1 edit)

Yeah, a lot of that is my fault to be honest. I did think that the character movement was too floaty and imprecise, but with how things were going for both of us, there sadly wasn't enough time to fine tweak the movement. When you mention a "highly physics-based game" I want to explain that was the full intention at the beginning of the month. The idea behind design was to open up with standard 2d character movement, have the player beat the first boss (we REALLY did not get that far into design) and have all of the mechanics and abilities focused on controlling inertia during "oil-surfing" areas. I have no disagreements that this game is far from even a demo to convey an idea, but with how things were going in both of our lives, it was very challenging to coordinate and get work done on the project. however, I do plan on continuing this project on my own in my personal engine so that I can do all the fine-tweaking I want, but because of how inefficient my engine is, it may take a while to get anything substantial out of the project. I am really glad that you commented on this project, and I want to say thank you for your suggestions. I guess I have learned to check my calendar before making a month-long commitment. A bit of an obvious thing to know, but we all have blind spots.

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XCompWiz4 years ago

No worries! And no need to be hard on yourself. :)

Sounds like you had some cool ideas, and I'd be interested to see the physics-based approach you had in mind!

I'd discourage you from working in your own engine. It can work, but, from experience, if you are working on a game in an engine you built, what you actually end up working on is the engine, and the game never progresses. I recommend sticking with Godot, or using another existing engine if you prefer. You can achieve all the same fine-tweaking in Godot, without needing to do ALL of the fine-tweaking. It's worth it to build something on what is and improve it rather than making something new from scratch.

None of us got everything we wanted to do done, so we're all aware of the calendar issue. :D Hope your life events were at least positive and constructive.

If you are looking at doing a very "oil surfing" physics platformer, you might get more mileage out of looking at Tribes than Celeste. If I can think of something more appropriate or come across dev diaries that look useful, I'll let you know. :)

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