So, turns out that Sunday is „Improve-Movement-Model“-Day. I decided to nail down how the character moves to finally move on an actually start creating levels.

In platformers I’m usually a big fan of super crisp, digital movement. There is no inertia and no run-up. But this kind of movement would be too hectic for the co-op experience. Therefore I decided to use a physics based movement model in which I “enhance” real physics. Just using the standard Unity Rigidbody and applying the correct forces felt too floaty and slippery for me. So I took some inspiration from the Doom movement model. Here the player is always slowed down by a vector that is opposite of the current movement direction as long as there are no inputs. In physics this should be handled by friction, but when I increased the friction of the player the starting of the movement became too sluggish. So now I slow the player only when he is not trying to go somewhere.

 

Furthermore I pondered for a long time if I should keep the double jump in the game. I decided to leave it in to give a player that got screwed by a throw a slim chance to recover. Else the screwed one is completely helpless and I think that will leave some players frustrated. Now I just have to figure out a good balance for how long a double jump is possible (it is based on the y-speed) of the player.

Finally just a quick venting: Uninstalling Visual Studio 2013 took almost an hour on my aging notebook. That was already bad enough. Installing VS2015 that comes with the newer versions of unity actually takes two fricking hours. Back when Unity shipped with Mono-Develop the entire installing process was done in 15mins. For both pieces of software… At least the setup gave me time to type up this piece of text…