Map Building

Since my last Devlog I've been working on building out a more completed map for our player and enemies to move around in. I started scaling up the size of the map, because as it was before the speed of the player made each map section feel too small. We didn't want to slow the player down so I opted to increase the amount of space the player had to move around in by pulling the camera back.  I also began to draw out a handful of example map shapes that would take into account the kinds of Metroidvania mechanics that we wanted to introduce into our game, such as backtracking and platforming (and maybe some hidden areas!)

I tried to use the game Blasphemous as my main source of reference when designing areas of the map , as that is my favourite Metroidvania title and it has a very easy to understand map design. We ended up going with the map shape on the top left, however it was slightly altered in the final design once we realized that the new larger tile size would have made the central room way too big.  I started to build a to-scale version of that design and filled it in with a placeholder tileset while we still decide on what kind of visual aesthetic we want the game to have. I also marked down what each section of the map would likely be used for.

Platforms

We wanted to create some new types of platforms that could be used to make the platforming more interesting. Since player movement is such a big focus in our game, we need to have more than one way for them to traverse the levels and make exploring more fun. The three kinds of platforms I focused on were One-way Platforms, Fall Through Platforms, and Moving Platforms.

• One-way Platforms
  • these are platforms that let you jump up from beneath them, passing through the ground, but also being able to land on top again as if it is solid ground
  • This was made by taking advantage of the 2D platform effector component in Unity, which has an option to make surfaces into one-way platforms. This ended up being the easiest of the three platforms to create!
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• Moving Platforms
  • This one is pretty self-explanatory, the platforms are meant to move between two points continuously, and the player can jump onto them and move with them.
  • This was done by having the platform "bounce" between two game objects labeled "PointA" and "PointB"
  • The platform constantly moves towards whichever of the two points is set as "nextPositon", then when it hits that point, the other point is now equal to "nextPosition". The code looks like this:
    if(transform.position == nextPosition) {     nextPosition = (nextPosition == pointA.position) ? pointB.position : pointA.position; }
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• Fall Through Platforms
  • This was the most difficult of the three platforms to create. Originally I had created a script that attached to the platform, and would disable the collider of that platform when the player hit the "down" key while standing on top of it. This worked as intended buy the player was still able to perform actions while falling through. 
  • Chris helped me implement this fall through code into the player's movement behaviour instead, as that was build to check if the player was free to perform an action before they could do it. Once the actual FallThrough method was triggered by both the player standing on the correctly tagged of platform and being free to perform the down movement, it was just a matter of disabling the collider of the object underneath and then re-enabling it in a courotine.
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Movement Tech

Something fun that I discovered when playing around with our characters movement (specifically the dodge roll and the air stall), was that these two movement actions chained together could actually give the player a longer and higher jump than usual. A gap that normally couldn't be cleared with a full speed jump, or even a jump that's been accelerated with the dodge roll, could be achieved if you time an air dodge properly at the end. This game me the idea to add the "secret room" in the top left corner of the map, which will be made to only be accessible if the player can pull off this slightly more advances movement tech. I really felt like this was sticking true to the heart of the Metroidvania genre so I was very excited that our character had the ability to do these advanced and fun maneuvers!

Our project is starting to really come together. I'm very proud of the work we've all done so far and I'm excited to show off more as we get further along the development process!