Player Movement

Player Movement for Nelson Nugget’s Adventure

Controls:

A: Left

D: Right

Spacebar:  jump

Overview:

For this project, the basic sprites are created through modification of the below reference image. This modification was done through piskel, creating the character Nelson Nugget, shown in the Edited sprites section below. From here running, jumping, standing, falling and dying animations were created for both left and right directions.

Reference image for sprites:

Edited sprites:

Art style:

A quirky art style was selected to make nelson a cartoonish looking nugget that contrasts with his detailed human like legs to give a comical effect to his design, helping to convey the silliness of the game.

Animation creation:

The animations themselves were done through slicing up the sprite shit into individual cells then selecting the needed movements, moving them into the scene and saving theme as animation clips. Although the standing animations were made through making an animation empty that simply plays one sprite on the loop so that he has the ability to stay still when later applied in the animation controller.

Using a player animation controller, the player can make use of these animations as they are applied to the motion states within the controller. This in combination with a simple directional code modified from a previous eight-way movement code made to fit the side scroller play style, Nelson becomes a moveable and functional character. The code was changed so that the left and right using A and D still functioned but there is an added element so he can jump and fall. To make him work in the world he also has rigidbody and collider components added to him.

Personal Testing:

Through testing some ideas to improve game movement has come through, such as adding a double jump feature. This would allow more flexibility for level design later in the game creation process.

Issues in development:

When creating the sprites there was a problem as the allotted sprite cell sizes were misjudged in the design phase, so the jumping characters head would get cut off at then end of the animation. This was fixed easily through further editing of the sprite until the look was complete.

Piskel - New piskel (piskelapp.com)

https://opengameart.org/content/platformer-animations