The deadline for alpha is closing in on us and our little bat game. Still the stress to get the features needed into the game isn’t really that bad. We have the situation under control, I think.
This week my main focus has been on the controls of the bat, our game’s avatar. After the playtesting session we got a lot of feedback that our controls felt sluggish, slow and that the bat was to difficult to maneuver through the level. We also had a move related mechanic that wasn’t present in the pre-alpha that I had to implement.
So first thing first, the bat’s movement system. The feedback we got was that the movement was slow and also that counteracting the momentum from a move was to difficult to do. I basically had to rework the entire movement system. I sped up the bat a bit but mostly I focused on reducing the problem with counteracting movement. The way the movement system works is that if the player holds down a directional key the bat keeps gaining speed in that direction. I the player lets go of that directional key the speed in that direction will gradually decrease and eventually the bat would stop moving completely in that direction. Therefore before the bat could start to move in the opposite direction it would first have to overcome its current movement. So the solution for this problem was just to make the pools of speed drain faster. This makes it so that the controls feels a lot more responsive which might be good, but for me personally, also makes the game feel a bit to controllable. This avatar is a bat and should not really control like a well-oiled fighter jet, I liked the concept of having a pretty difficult to control avatar but I guess some times you have to listen to the “customers”.
The mechanic that needed to be included was the dash mechanic. When the player doubletaps a directional key the bat should do a quick little dash in that direction. First I had to solve the basic functionality of being able to double click. I made this work with a timer, so if the player presses a key it starts the double click -timer for that key, if the player then presses that key again before the timer runs out it counts as a double click. If double click (dash) is activated the player gets a speed boost in that direction for a short time. This isn‘t the perfect dash system as we envisioned it but it‘s good enough for alpha.
Now for the alpha showing I hope that the controls are good enough to show at least, which was the point of this week. Now it‘s time to start making things work well and clean for the beta.
Korv makes games 
The movement system seems interesting but it might be a little risky. Just as people pointed out during the pre-alpha game testing, I imagine that if the controls aren’t correctly balanced the movement may end up feeling sluggish and unresponsive. I really hope you hit the sweet spot when it comes to the controls.
Your saying that you like the concept of an avatar that is difficult to maneuver, however I feel that you’ve made the right choice when you opted for a faster and more responsive control. From what I know of the game the gameplay is supposed to be fast paced, the player is going to dodge objects and complete the level as fast as possible. I believe that a character that is hard to maneuver could be extremely frustrating in that kind of game and it would therefor counteract the concept of the game.
This blog post would have benefited from a short video showing off how the movement works, as it is easier to understand how the system works if you can observe it.
I look forward to testing the game before the beta because I think you got an interesting game with a lot of potential.
GillaGilla