Devlog #2 - Level Blocking

This weeks main focus was level-blocking/design, the week consisted of developing two levels, although I was only able to  complete one. The plan is for level one to be a sort of tutorial, where you can learn the controls, and some basic jump puzzles. Level 2 will consist of more complex puzzles and jumps. 

By using an asset pack created by Maaot called "Darkcave Assets". And with the four sprite sheets provided from this asset pack, I sliced each sprite sheet into its own sprite. I then created a grid with six tilemap objects, and then dragged all sprites into my tile palette.

Within the grid, I created the tilemaps, Ground, Background, Backerground(Idk why I called it this, brain just wasn't braining), Foreground, Forerground and lastly Traps. As with the perfect naming conventions backerground would be behind the background, and  same with foreground. For the Traps tile map, this would be used for spikes which would kill the player. Lastly for the ground tilemap that would include walls and roofing.

With the backerground, to create more depth, I changed the tilemap color to be darker, which you can see in the below image. This made the background less "boring", as before it was just pitch black and lacked depth and detail.

Fixes:

From week 1, I had discussed having sprite problems when building, as well as the Player Movement script overriding my impulse script, which messed with the rigid body of the player. Firstly with the sprite problems, Unity had problems animating single sprite animations, so by putting each sprite animation into a single sprite sheet, then reimporting it into unity somehow fixed it, which was a relief. Onto the second problem, by disabling the player movement script for 0.4 seconds when the impulse ability is used, which you can't notice in the build, allows the Player rigid body to travel a further distance, which makes the impulse ability feel much smoother and overall better.

Feedback:

This week I got quite a bit of feedback,

• Ian had said that to get the player to impulse straight up, he would have to click a bit more right of the character, so the center of the impulse isn't correct, which will definitely be something I will have to look into. Ian also mentioned that an animation/effect of using the Impulse would be good, as well as a circular cursor charge bar and maybe even a screen shake when at max charge.
• For Level-design, feedback was great, some little things that people had mentioned was the platforms  and spikes were hard to differentiate between background and things that might be interactable or kill the player.

Added features:

by listening to feed back I've now added some new things, the original charge bar is now replaced with a circular charge bar, which will appear when held down next to the cursor. Screen shake when at max charge was also added with the use of Cinemachine (using the cinemachine impulse source and listener).

Certain spikes will also now kill the player (In the current build when the player dies I've disabled the player's rigid body instead of destroying the object), a death animation will also play which currently is kind of  broken.