Levels now have ladders. Seems simple, right? Think again!
And we're trying out some quick'n'dirty jump pads too.
Verticality Matters
This is a side-on, co-op, all-players-visible-on-the-same-screen game — with gravity.
But gravity giveth, and gravity taketh away: players spend a lot of time on the ground at the bottom of the screen.
That means a lot of screen space is wasted, which is a wasted opportunity for more chaos.
Now obviously players can jump1 from platform to platform, but such platform arrangements take up a lot of space.
What else can we do?
Ladders
Ladders are fun in Broforce, so I figured I'd they'd add some of that vaunted verticality here too.
Initially, I had characters snap (& stay locked) to the middle of ladders:
I went with that approach so that a future ladder-climbing animation would line up with the ladder, but it had two problems:
- Keyboard controls clash: pressing up is now both "jump" and "climb up". How can I differentiate the player’s intent?”?
- Ladder 'immunity': while climbing, players aren't affected by any other forces! They can't be knocked off by attacks, and can phase through the ground - whoops!
I switched to a simpler scheme, where ladder climbing uses the normal movement logic except:
- there's no gravity force applied.
- if a player isn't trying to move sideways much, we pretend the player is trying to move towards the center of the ladder - which has the effect of centering them on the ladder.
To handle jumping vs climbing, I first tried a separate jump control for keyboard players. But then I realized there's a much neater solution!
Now that the player can move left-right while on a ladder, they can just move sideways to get off the ladder... and if they move off while holding the "up" key (or the "jump" button on a controller), we make them jump!
The last tricky thing is handling standing on top of ladders, otherwise it'd be real painful to walk between two platforms separated by the top of a ladder: 2
Anyway, after all that, I am not sure if ladders work well with players destroying (and possibly creating new) terrain. We'll find out later!
Shrooms
Another way to get a bit of vertical action is via "jump pads".
They're more common in science fiction settings but we can try them here too:
This is totally hacked in and doesn't handle destructible terrain properly yet, but I want to see if the mechanic is fun. 3
Playable web build
Test it out - let me know what ladder edge-cases I missed, and whether these 'shrooms are any fun.
You way want to zoom out with - (or use the View menu).
That's all for now! I was planning to try using these to make some better levels too, but life events intervened. 4
And steam-jump, if they know the spell.
Because you'd fall down a little until you were "on" the ladder, which would mean you wouldn't be able to get onto the next platform unless you pressed up to go up the ladder again.
Also, being able to stand on top of ladders makes it easier to reach the top of adjacent platforms when you're dismounting from a ladder.
And if this mechanic does stay, then the jump pads probably won't be mushrooms! I like the idea of catapults, or something like that.
Life events like having a circuit breaker trip while doing a Linux operating system upgrade, so you get to spend 2 days repairing and ultimately re-installing your workstation's operating system instead of doing useful work.
But you know how it goes: when life gives you lemons, you use it as an excuse to swap from OpenSuse to Fedora, and find out that Fedora is a lot more cohesive and bug-free than OpenSuse was.
So I suppose it worked out.