Weekly Devlog 1 : Player Movement

WELCOME TO WEEKLY DEVLOG OF EXILE'S ADVENTURE. 

It’s the first episode of this series and the first thing i would introduce to you is PLAYER MOVEMENT

Why did I choose this for implementing?

In many types of games , especially ARPG, player movement always is a indispensable thing, which contributes a lot to evaluation the game. So, when I started making Exile’s Adventure, the first features i want to added into this is definitely movement system.

How was this created ? 

Exile's Adventure has a very simple and popular movement system, which could make the character move to 8 directions.  It was created by using Rigidbody2D in Unity, which is a component allow character react to real-time physics, and a script to change the character's location based on the input of player through Rigidbody2D. 

Come to animation part, animation of moving character were created from the tileset below by linking 4 small images into 1 clip. As you can see, this sprite could provide 4 clips representing the 4 directions of moving character, which are South, West, East, North and depending on the change of the character's position, each clip has its own trigger condition.

Credit DragonDePlatino from OpenGameArt.org ( https://opengameart.org/content/dawnlike-16x16-universal-rogue-like-tileset-v181 )

How does this work ? 

Each time the player presses one of below buttons, the character will move to the direction which the button represents : 

• W : North
• S : South
• A : West
• D : East

Player movement with single button

Player can also presses 2 buttons at the same time to move the character because it's 8 direction movement system: 

• W and D : North East (NE)
• W and A: North West (NW)
• S and D : South East (SE)
• S and A : South West (SW)

Player movement with 2 buttons

*Note: if the player presses at the same time 2 buttons represent opposite directions ( W and S or A and D), the character will not move.

Feedback and Improvement 

In the tutorial time of KIT109 of UTAS, i had received a feedback about the movement system through  some testers, who are my classmates  : 

Andrew Bleasel : "Super good start, honestly. Art direction feels good, as does the movement. It feels a little fast, and the animation doesn't catch up, but that's a minor detail at this point."

After receiving this feedback, I immediately did some tests with the character's speed and I fully agreed with Andrew. The current character's speed is too fast and it is the biggest cause of some animation not being displayed correctly. Therefore, i had to set the speed of character to be slower a bit and it actually made the animation feel a lot better. It will be updated in the next build of Exile's Adventure.

Player movement improved by decreasing the character's speed

There is one more potential improvement of movement system which is about the moving animations. Since the movement system of this game now could support the character move in 8 directions, but the animation only works for 4 so now it's lacked the remaining 4, which are NE, NW, SE , SW . There are a couple of ways for fixing that : using another tileset character which can provide enough 8 directions or keeping this tileset and make the animation by myself. I'm still considering about which option to choose but definitely there will be an update on this in some upcoming builds so please look forward to it.