Blog Post 3 (2nd Playtest)

Changes since the last playtest:

I reduces the right and left movement. Initially, I thought it would be pretty easy, but it took me like an hour to do. I decided to redo my momentum system to be able to dynamically add features, so I made it event based. 

public delegate void MomentumEvent(int speedIndex); 
public MomentumEvent OnMomentumChange; 

It might seem overkill right now, but being able to dynamically add and remove features will speed up the design process a lot.

I also changed the way momentum increases. Before, momentum would increase based on amount of time spent--so that meant that if you went afk for 10 minutes, you would have crazy high momentum. It also meant that if you were slow with making your jumps your momentum would be too high for later parts, which made testing and editing too variable.

So I changed it so that your momentum increases to a fixed amount when you're in certain "speedzones". That makes the iterative design process a lot easier, because I don't have to worry about different momentums. 

Here's where that event based movement system comes in handy--I can change the way momentum is handled without having to worry about what that does to the rest of the game.

I also revamped the graphics of the game. I added a skybox, some post processing, and some city assets. Here's how that turned out:

Playtests:

The horizontal movement is still way too fast. I reduced it slightly from the last playtest because I thought that would've been good enough. Nope, the players are still being launched. It should be an easy fix again, though (actually this time),

[SerializeField] private float defaultTurnSpeedMultiplier = 0.8f;

I just have to change this value.

The biggest issue I noticed was that there was too high a difficulty ramp. The game went from being too easy to having a jump that literally no one was able to land. There was a part where you had to do a triple jump while also changing your direction mid air. Playtesters weren't able to change their direction fast enough to be able to land the jumps. I should just be able to move in one of the platforms to make that jump easier though. 

But this points out another big problem in the game. What I think is too easy in the game is too hard for others. Since I've been though the level so many times, I thought it was way too easy--because I could land the jumps in pretty much one attempt. Which means that my judgement and how I feel about the difficulty about the game is warped.

The speed zone areas didn't contrast enough with the rest of the level. The players thought the speed zone areas were the same as the normal platforms. Some didn't even notice that there was a color change between them. The ones who did, didn't notice that it was speeding them up. Some sort of shader/color change combo should fix that issue. Something to tell the player they're speeding up.

I also tested out a "dev" version of checkpoints, the player could press C to add a checkpoint. I wanted to see if it ruined the players flow of momentum, but it turned out that it really didn't--which was not what I had originally thought would happen. The only thing that was jarring about it was that the player's camera would face the same direction as when they reset-- meaning that if you were facing north and "died", you would still be facing north when you "respawned". But a couple lines of code should fix that.

Hassan from the future here. Here's the fix.

//Start()
SavedCameraRotation = camera.transform.rotation;
//Reset()
camera.transform.rotation = SavedCameraRotation;

I also noticed a glitch that occurred during the playtest. If the player collided with the edge of a platform, it would launch them into the sky. I don't really know how to fix this, it's an issue with Unity's physics system. If I had more time, I would've made my own physics system, but I can't do that right now. Some fix with changing the shape of the colliders should help.