Of course as part of designing and testing the levels I needed to create them so that they worked, and were playable. Some of which I needed to code a final iteration of for the full game. Others were placeholder until our main coder had finished the final mechanics.
A nicer placeholder grapple
For the grappling early on, you would walk up to a yellow cube, press a button and something would happen. Of course to test grappling properly I needed to create something the grapple length which I could also aim with, as it would behave in a similar enough way to the final mechanic. The placeholder was just a block that appears, but it worked. This allowed to start coding the grapple-able object behavior as well. This started as something physics based, a one-shot force would be applied to an object with limited movement, and it would stop when it collided with another object.
This of course wasn't perfect, but it allowed me to grey box the game and test it to a decent standard.
Animated platform movement
Using physics though had it's own problems, it was a pain to get it to behave properly, and even when I did it was still glitched and problematic. Platforms would fall or fly away, go in the wrong direction or other undesirable things. One reason I stuck with it is because it was easy to duplicate and change for other sections, and it would still work. However, after probably being quite stubborn and trying to get it to work properly, I decided to key-frame animate the platform movement, this decision I should have made sooner. It is slower as each object needs to be individually animated, however the result was much nicer, how the platform moved was much more controllable, and a better part was that there were no glitches. The animation played, the platform was where it needed to be and you could move on.
Warping Platforms and improvement
The warping platform mechanic was a big challenge, getting it to work at all was a learning curve and it took a lot of work and thought. To have it only active at the right time posed difficulties. A script on the player has to be used to detect and affect only the platform it was in contact with and any booleans that needed setting, as soon as the player left the platform in any way it would have to stop working again. The initial mechanic of moving a platform with a normalized distance was not too difficult, however it did take some thought.
I ended up with a mechanic I liked, for the most part. An issue was that in order to get the affected moving platform to the right place, the player would have to stand in the center of the platform they are on. That isn't some that players know to do, or would want to do. So with the much help and explanation from our main coder, we managed to change the code so that the player did not have to stand in the center of the platform, but could walk from side to side without the other platform moving. I also decided to make the mechanic only work with X and Z co-ordinates, which create a much more accurate result.
A nicer placeholder grapple
For the grappling early on, you would walk up to a yellow cube, press a button and something would happen. Of course to test grappling properly I needed to create something the grapple length which I could also aim with, as it would behave in a similar enough way to the final mechanic. The placeholder was just a block that appears, but it worked. This allowed to start coding the grapple-able object behavior as well. This started as something physics based, a one-shot force would be applied to an object with limited movement, and it would stop when it collided with another object.
This of course wasn't perfect, but it allowed me to grey box the game and test it to a decent standard.
Animated platform movement
Using physics though had it's own problems, it was a pain to get it to behave properly, and even when I did it was still glitched and problematic. Platforms would fall or fly away, go in the wrong direction or other undesirable things. One reason I stuck with it is because it was easy to duplicate and change for other sections, and it would still work. However, after probably being quite stubborn and trying to get it to work properly, I decided to key-frame animate the platform movement, this decision I should have made sooner. It is slower as each object needs to be individually animated, however the result was much nicer, how the platform moved was much more controllable, and a better part was that there were no glitches. The animation played, the platform was where it needed to be and you could move on.
Warping Platforms and improvement
The warping platform mechanic was a big challenge, getting it to work at all was a learning curve and it took a lot of work and thought. To have it only active at the right time posed difficulties. A script on the player has to be used to detect and affect only the platform it was in contact with and any booleans that needed setting, as soon as the player left the platform in any way it would have to stop working again. The initial mechanic of moving a platform with a normalized distance was not too difficult, however it did take some thought.
I ended up with a mechanic I liked, for the most part. An issue was that in order to get the affected moving platform to the right place, the player would have to stand in the center of the platform they are on. That isn't some that players know to do, or would want to do. So with the much help and explanation from our main coder, we managed to change the code so that the player did not have to stand in the center of the platform, but could walk from side to side without the other platform moving. I also decided to make the mechanic only work with X and Z co-ordinates, which create a much more accurate result.
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