Kilan Larsen
370 Blog Post 5 - Postmortem
What went right?
- Making a Character Controller based player character, rather than a rigidbody based one
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This is EASILY the largest point of success in my opinion. It's a seemingly subtle and small part of the game, but it's incredible important for the feel and ease of use for a platformer. Rigidbody based characters are subject to the Unity physics engine, which might sound great for a game all about momentum and gun knockback, but in reality this would have caused the player character to have all sorts of problems, such as floaty movement, sticking to walls, clipping through corners, the works. A Character Controller based character gives me full control over the physics of the player and must more tight and fluid controls, which is precisely what you want for a game all about its movement. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback to the movement/controls of the game and I attribute it like, 95% to this one decision.
- Clean HUD, reload bar over the player's head
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Having a simple HUD keeps the player focused on the gameplay and not all of the extra little things going on in the game. Health and ammo are essential, and then the powerups and reloading are a 'nice to know' sort of thing. So, the player's hearts and ammo count are displayed visually with icons on the left (the dominant side of the screen since people read left to right), and then when a powerup is collected it appears in the bottom right, out of the way but still there if you need a quick reminder.
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Putting the reload bar above the player's head only when reloading was a smart move because it's a quick action that you only need to see at certain times. And you don't want to have to look in the corner or sides of the screen to see how long the reload will last if you're dodging enemies, so having it above the player puts that info where it is most visible. Overall quite nice!
What went wrong?
This is tougher for me, since if I feel that something is wrong with my programming during development I will quickly address and fix it. But definitely the gun aiming system was faulty in the beginning, and was a major point of feedback during the first build of the game.
Bad Gun Rotation
Fixed Gun Rotation
It's pretty good now, but originally the gun's rotation was terrible and it took me some time to figure out how to fix it.
Another thing that went wrong was the health bar. I had originally designed it as a bar that decreases as you get hit. However, this wasn't super clear to players what it was supposed to be at first, and so I modified the system to use 3 hearts instead.
Health Bar
Hearts
It's a simple change, but it makes a big difference. The hearts are immediately identifiable as health where as the bar isn't clear until you take damage and watch it decrease.
What would I do differently?
If I were to start over and do things differently I would spend more time playing with the gun knockback settings and try to get it feeling as clean and consistent as possible.
Gun Knockback Consistency:
There are still issues where the gun sometimes seems to knock you back different distances for performing the same action.
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Bullet Speed When Firing:
The bullets can get kinda buggy too, if you fire them near the tip of the gun they will actually move slower for some reason.
Firing Upwards:
Shooting the gun upwards can cause the player to be knocked upwards into the air, which doesn't make any sense. Ideally, the player would not move at all if standing on the ground, or be pushed towards the ground if firing upwards in mid-air.
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All in all though, things went pretty smoothly! I'm quite proud of the player movement systems I have going on here, even if they are a little bit buggy. I'm sure if I had more time I could do them even better!