Devlog - Player movement

Player movement implementation is the subject of this week’s devlog.

Overview and implementation

For my game, two different movement modes have been implemented,

WASD movement:

Mouse-based movement:

For lack of better terminology, I’ll refer to WASD movement as ‘hovering’, and mouse-based movement as ‘flying’. Hovering was modelled off of the EightWayMovement tutorial script, with the single alteration being that when the right mouse button is pressed, hovering is disabled, and instead the player ‘flies’ by moving at a constant velocity towards the mouse cursor.

The impetus for these different modes of movement is two-fold:

• To elicit the feeling of superhero flight in the player – a speedy feeling

Omni man flying speedily

• To create interesting gameplay by allowing the player to move much faster, at the cost of being unable to use attacks or abilities (these aren’t implemented yet). I’ve always enjoyed simple trade-offs like this in games.

An alternative way to implement movement like this would just be to have some sort of toggle that makes the player move faster, while still using WASD controls. I briefly considered this but opted for the mouse-based movement as allows for more freedom of movement, in terms of directions the player can travel, which I feel better captures the feeling of flying.

Feedback

The inclusion of two different movement modes was generally well-received, with it being described as “fluid and fun” and “an interesting premise”.

One constructive piece of feedback was that the transition to flight feels very sudden. The player instantly accelerates upon pressing right-click.

How I’ll integrate this feedback into development isn’t something that I've made a final decision on yet, but there are two main ideas I have:

The first one is to keep the transition between movement modes as being sudden, but to emphasise the transition more visually so that it’s clear that flying is meant to feel markedly different from regular movement.

An artist’s rendition of how this could look

The second idea is to ‘smooth out’ the transition a little, by making it so that the player accelerates up to top speed when flying, rather than instantly moving at that velocity.

A combination of these two approaches could work quite well.

References:

Omni man flying speedily
https://www.polygon.com/comics/22412643/invincible-finale-season-1-omni-man-comi...