Six months since previous progress update! There was good progress made after the last post, then summer came... and this year made good use of it and did not spend much time at the computer.
Been back this week, continuing on making progress with ARW.
Level to become tutorial and character customization area.
While working on the game I felt the character controls could be improved, mainly the movement of the character. Started changing the player to be faster, more precise and with a quicker slow down from friction. Also fixed and improved how the player moves on slopes and sharp edges, the old solution did not handle it well if standing on a slope and trying to go up. Similar if on an edge, the player could almost get stuck, now you either fall off or able to move back up.
A larger addition was adding dynamic colliders to the player. Meaning that the collision for the player changes to match the animations. There is a bit of setup doing the shapes in the editor and then defining which shape to use for what frame, but all in all quite straightforward. Created a test
function that lets you set a frame of an animation and see the collider, with hot reloading it is quite fast to check and tweak shapes and what frames they are for.
Blue is the default collider, green are collider shapes that can be dynamically used.
Previously it was always the circle collider, now it changes to different capsule colliders during animation.
Having the dynamic collider led to adding a sliding ability to the player. If moving left/right and above a certain speed, the player slide on the ground when pressing down. This can be used to slide under areas with not enough height to walk through.
This also added a combo to the game. By sliding and then directly jumping, you can do a power jump that is about 50% higher than a regular jump. There is since before the ability to do a heavy slam into the ground, by jumping and pressing down, this is now extended to have an even heavier slam if you do the power jump before slamming into the ground.
Regular jump, with a slam, followed by the power jump and slam.
I had an itch to add some more abilities, a final addition was being able to slide slowly against walls if you press against them while in the air. If in such a slide, it is possible to press the opposite direction to do a wall jump parkour style.
Ending this update by putting them all together in a final little gif. If interested the current build can be played in the browser at https://dev.spelmakare.se/arw?debug. Thanks for reading!
Spelmakare is game development using web technologies.
