Great demo, Mark! Much improved character control!
(V2.0, played on a Mac with a PS4 controller)
Some things I liked:
- The magnet character's subtle face animations when you are picking up the magnet, throwing the magnet, etc. You must reveal his name and backstory in your completed work!
- The trail animations behind the magnet looks great! (how did you do that?)
- The fact that you can jump up beneath a level select tube and release the magnet without having to aim makes fast level progression feel quick and snappy.
- The way that the robot jumps without his wheel early on in the jump animation is whimsical and I love it (not sure if that was in the previous version or not though)
Spotted some bugs for you:
- In both fullscreen and windowed mode, when the symbols on the top and bottom of the screen (jump/polarity instruction, key count, level reset indicator, etc.) were slightly visible but halfway cut off screen. I believe the intent was to hide them fully.
- If you pause and select "Return to Hub" at the start of the game, you can skip the first area.
- If you pass through the moveable, non-magnetized "L" shaped barrier and immediately walk backwards, the door does not sense the collision once the animation of the barrier is over. Once you move away from the barrier and re-collide with it, it works as intended. Kinda feels a bit weird if you ever attempt to double back.
- If you head back into an already completed level, the key is gone so you are stuck in the level. The only way to exit the level is to use the pause menu, but I think there are other ways to bring the player back to the hub, like either activating a magnetic field in the level's Mario pipe or even including the key again in an "already collected" state (like the blue stars in Super Mario 64). The latter might even allow for some level practicing fun in case players want to try to see how fast they can complete each level or practice for a speed run of the game.
- Not sure if this one is a bug or not, but when I hold Square to throw the magnet, the character continues to move a few steps before entering the aiming state. Could just be my personal preference, but I think a snappier, more immediate transition into throwing would feel better from a gamefeel perspective. I do see how this feature is useful when first picking up the magnet, so perhaps a few lines of code can be used to enable the delay only when picking up the magnet off the ground.
Keep up the good work! Love the game idea and love the Developing series! Looking forward to the basics of Unity video! Please include all of your abstraction strategies in there, as those will be super useful for new programmers!