Player Movement

This first week of game development was about creating the player character and giving them movement capacity. The goal for this players movement was to have eight-way movement using WASD controls as well as a teleportation movement controlled by the left click of the mouse, aimed using mouse movement. Simple sprites are used to focus on implementation of the movement codes. For both the character and the portal icon simple circle sprites are used; coloured green for the alien and purple for the portal. However, the character is still set up in a way where animated sprites could be set up easily at a later date. The current sprites for the alien and the portal can be seen in the image below. 

Eight-way movement was chosen for this game as it works smoothly with the top-down format. To begin with the eight-way movement script from class tutorials was transferred over onto the player game object. This code could be easily modified to run as needed by commenting out all animation code so that it just runs the basic eight-way movement. Implementing and testing this code was done very quickly and easily.

The teleportation code was certainly more complicated as it required modifying the player shooting code to fit the desired outcome. Using the calculated mouse direction the portal location could be decided by using if statements to determine wether the portal should be shown at the aligning north east south west position. From there, the shooting conditional statement could be changed so that on click the player transform position is changed to that of the portals position. As shown below in the gif, the players movement was fully functional as intended. 

My roomate tested the character and was able to manoeuvre through the test box intuitively. They did not notice any malfunctioning to the movements. Also in my own personal testing, it appeared to work as intended.

Future Thoughts

This week created a great basis for continuing character development. Further developments will most likely include how the characters size and teleport distance affects level design, and wether it will need modification. From there, with a higher focus on the artistic elements of the game design, character sprites can then be designed effectively. It has been difficult narrowing down the artistic direction for this game as it feels like the style of this game should be influenced by its play. As the sizes and positioning of objects will affect the effectivity of level design, since the game is so based around character position and movement. So while uncertain of how all puzzle elements will end up functioning, most of the development of this game will be done using simple shape sprites.