Corona-cation (Day 22)

Post-jam fixes and tweaks


    After the step back project was released yesterday I had some friends play-test. There were multiple bugs found and I got some good feedback. Today (and part of yesterday) I started implementing changes and fixing some of the more game-breaking bugs.
    One of the first things I did was edit the player's movement. The friends I had play it thought movement felt floaty and imprecise. I fixed the floatiness by changing some of unreal's standard settings. I increased "air control" to .8 and that felt much better already. Now if you jumped you could actively make corrections instead of being helplessly stuck in mid-air until you were to land. I want to edit the jump more in the future and make it more like Nexus from last year.
    I also messed around with the door collision because one of the biggest complaints was on level 3 when you had to push a box through a doorway it would get stuck 9/10 times. I fixed this by making the doors retract further. This helps with the collision issue but also shows the seams of the door that are not meant to be seen. I will have to get one of the artists to adjust the model in the future.
    One of the suggestions from my friends was to make the cubes face the player like Portal does. I did this today and I'm unsure if I like it or not. On one hand it doesn't spin out of control, but on the other hand it looks kinda weird and boring having a flat blue face staring at you.
    I also got rid of the prop-fly feature from the jam release. This "feature" was heavily utilized in the speed-runs that we did to get over or up walls. It was quite hard to control though and sometimes you would do it by accident, so it had to go. I basically did that by not allowing the player to pick up the boxed if they were standing on them and they would be automatically dropped if the player hit the box while looking down. The looking down part was done to prevent the box from being dropped if the player ran into it while looking at a wall. This could have unintended consequences but for the time being it seems to work well. Here's that BP:


    All these changes make speedrunning less fun, but the intended game more fun. I anticipate playing lots of Portal and similar games in the future to study how physics puzzles can be made reliable and fair to the player. 


Here's one of my speedrun attempts from yesterday:

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