Devlog Week 1

Player Movement

Was able to get the movement done this week. I think for now t is in a good enough state to move onto other parts of the project now though as the game progresses I'm sure that I will make adjustments based on feedback.

The way it works is essentially just generic eight-way-movement but the up direction is based on the players mouse position on the screen. So W and S move the character towards and away from the mouse respectively and A and D make the characters strafe to their left and right. This was tricky to implement and it took me a few attempts to get it to work nicely.

The first attempt I make moved the players rigidbody which had the forwards and backwards movement working but the sideways inputs circled around the mouse rather than strafing. It also didn't allow for diagonals as only one input would work, so pressing W and A would only move forwards.

I tried using transform.translate which did give better looking movement but the physics collisions stopped working properly so that was scrapped.

Eventually I tried to adapt the eight-way-movement script but couldn't get the up direction to face the mouse. Eventually I was shown how to use the local space of an object which fixed the problem. Basically all that had to be done was to change the velocity applied by the movement script to be based on the players local position rather than the world position.

Enemies

I brought over the A* components from the tutorials and was quickly able to set that up and made some generic enemies to chase the player. The enemies actually worked better than I thought and based on the feedback people liked the way they split apart to chase the player. I also made some other enemy types that target areas around the player so that they try to close in on the player and box them in.

The hardest part was finding where in the enemies movement script they set the target position so I got some help finding that. To have some variation some enemies were given an offset to the player position which makes them try to smother the player instead of just chase. They are also given a slight random variation in their positions so that they don't all target the exact same spot.

Feedback

People liked the movement but most said that it also took a while to get used too. 

The movement is very clever but as others have said it takes a little while to get used to, so maybe start the game with a more relaxed section that introduces the different movements without the pressure of the enemies

I think in the finished product I will definitely have to ease players into it rather than throwing them into the deep end. Maybe a short tutorial section as well as making initial waves slower and relaxed will help players get accustomed to the movement before things get too difficult. I'd prefer that if players lose the game it be because they got overwhelmed or overconfident rather than they were too busy wrestling with the controls.

I also got some feedback about the camera which I was expecting as I only slapped on the default cinemachine camera. I've changed that to better match the players movement.

Before

After

It might be a bit too tight so I will have to get some more feedback in week 2.

I've also made some character sprites and will work on getting a tileset for the level this week. Not sure If I will keep the characters legs or not, I think it looks better with the legs but I will have to clean up diagonal moving sprites as they look a bit weird.

No legs

With legs