Devlog Week 1

Assignment 3 Devlog 1 for Harrowing

This week is the first week of development of my game, Harrowing, although I did do most of this work previously to avoid clashing with some other uni assignments. The main focus for this week was getting The players movement in and some basic visuals for the player and the area. I started with basic left and right movement, before working on the jump for the player, At which point I used a bunch of squares to make designs for the player, stage and boss similar to what was seen on the concept art, which can be seen below:

The tutorial from youtuber Bendux was of great help (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xZ-rycYY8) for implementing the players basic movement, as well as how to stop the player sticking to walls, which affected the platforms I ended up placing in the arena. 

At this point, the player could move left and right at a constant speed, jump up and down. Before working on making sprites for each stage the player was in, I had to get the dash working too. Whilst I thought the dash wouldn’t be too hard, it ended up being a lot simpler than I imagined. As the dash was a constant speed, left right direction for a set duration, all I needed to do was change the player speed to get the dash working. Once this was done, all the simple movements were finished, So I started working on the sprites. This involved Using Piskel (Piskel.com) to make each form corresponding to the player's action, like moving left, falling right, jump left, etc. I ended up using walking left and right to represent the dashes in air or on ground, and not having a front facing idle sprite as it looked weird. The spritesheet looks as follows:

More animations could be made, specifically for dash, and for when the player attacks, but for now I am satisfied with them. There was an issue with the player, where it would prematurely switch to a falling sprite even if you were still moving upwards, which turned out to be because I was checking if the player had released the space bar instead of if the velocity was negative, which was promptly fixed. While playing around with the animations, I noticed that tapping space and launching to max jump height was kind of annoying, and would certainly be frustrating for precise positioning in a boss fight, which is why I tasked myself with adding jump height variance. Basically, the longer you held the space bar up till a point, the higher you would jump. This was accomplished by adding speed to the player all the way until max length of a timer, or the player let go, so only a bit of speed was added if the player tapped it, but a lot was added if the player held it. Once that was done, I just tweaked some of the settings for gravity, speed, jump height, dash speed etc. until I thought the movement was good, and in the end I actually really like moving around in it.

Another thing I did because I had the time, was making the boss move between tp points in the stage. This involved using the move between points stuff we learnt during tutorial 13, which was actually exactly what I needed when making this. There was a minor issue in getting it to move for the right duration, but that turned out to be because I set the starting point to the bosses transform itself, instead of the transform of the position it was at. The completed effect can be seen below (as well as the player movement and sprites):

Here were some notes on boss behavior that I wanted to write down in preparation for next weeks work:

• Starts of in middle, randomly generates 2 attacks
• Each attacks performs itself then resets the boss to a neutral state to lead into next attack
• After the attacks, it then moves to a random tp position in the arena and queues between 1-3 attacks.
• Keeps going until death
• Could be cool to have some sort of final attack to signify its almost dead

Attack idea 1: arms slam into the stage and little spikes appear on the ground that don't harm the player, after a delay, the extend upwards the whole screen, damaging the player if they don't position between them. Very similar to Pure Vessels nail wall or infection wall attack or Nightmare King Grimm’s tendril wall (Hollow Knight).

Attack idea 2: target the player with a laser beam that shoots 3 times, with an indicator of where it will land so the player can dodge. Could try and predict player position a bit as well

Attack idea 3: a phase 2 attack that uses his 4 hands, 4 hands stretch out and start spinning, player needs to move at right pace to not be hit by them

Attack idea 4: 2 hands move to either side of the arena and alternatingly release slightly homing projectiles at the player

This is enough attack ideas for now, will try implementing attack idea 1

Feedback:

Feedback giving during Friday’s tutorial: not much. As there wasn’t much of the game made, there wasn’t much to give feedback on. However, there was a bug found, where if the player stands close to an edge it would think the player was falling, which is because my ground check uses a circle that isn’t the entire width of the player. There was also a suggestion, which was adding coyote time, letting the player walk off the platform a bit and have time to jump, which would definitely help the player focus more on the bossfight and less on the rigid controls. 

Reference:

Bendux (2022). 2D Player Movement In Unity. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xZ-rycYY8.