Dev Log 3: Developing the movement mechanics

This last week of development has been mainly focused on getting some of our ideas for movement and movement abilities implemented in Godot. We had a bunch of ideas for what movement should look like and what abilities might be interesting, and we have implemented a good chunk of them. Our team's development velocity was a bit slower over the weekend, but we are looking to make some good progress throughout this next week.

Since our game will be heavily centered around the experience of controlling a moving character, its worth discussing how our current design for how the movement of the character looks. Taking inspiration from the speed-focused Source gamemode of Surf, our goal with the movement is to have players feel a bit sluggish if just controlling the character, but if they make skillful use of the range of abilities, they should be able to traverse through our levels very quickly and reach very high speeds.

To accomplish this, our player controller/kinematics are more physical in nature. The player's motion and velocity is subject to frictions and other accelerations. When these forces aren't present (like if the player is soaring through the air), the player character is able to maintain their velocity and move very quickly. In order to emphasize use of movement abilities to get around, our player moves fairly slowly when just running on the ground. Unlike other platformer games, the player's air influence is extremely limited. Platformers normally allow the player to move horizontally with similar or slightly less control and freedom than if they were grounded. In our game, the player will only have a slight influence on their horizontal velocity when in the air, much like the first person Source games that we are taking inspiration from for our game's movement and core loop.