Recently I’ve been working on two things that can make or break a game: controls and camera. I haven’t really finished them yet, but hey, I can still talk about it. In this devblog I’ll be mainly talking about movement in my game.
Inspirations
To some degree, I have a certain liberty with movement in my game compared to others. It isn’t a platformer or anything too twitchy, so I have the liberty to work with heavier controls, something I like a lot. My first experience with controls like that was a long time ago, with the original Prince of Persias (specifically the second one.)
Actually, this game was a platformer; but the controls were way more interesting than your average platformer. In a sense, the prince actually had weight. He was slow to start, slow to stop, slow to turn, slow to jump; and I loved it. The controls perhaps took longer to get used to than your average platformer, but once you did, it was great. Having a character that moved realistically helped with immersion and made most of the basic interactions more interesting.
Prince of Persia was an inspiration in another sense too: rotoscope. Rotoscoping is the technique of animating by copying recorded video frames. Basically, it’s like a traditional 2D mocap. Here’s a video showing the original recordings for POP. Now look at any video of the game and you’ll see the similarities. I’ve been using rotoscoping for practical reasons (I can’t animate at all) but it is also great for getting this realistic, heavy movement in my game.
Movement in my game
This is the basic movement loop test I have so far. It moves up more than it should but it’s basically what I want. But, I’m still missing pretty much everything else (including up and down animations). What I’ve mainly been advancing in is the programing aspect. For now, the black mage has kindly volunteered as my test sprite.
The interesting thing to look at here is the camera. One important thing to remember when making camera for a 2D game is that players need to see what ‘s coming to them, not themselves. That’s why I shift the camera to leave the character to the left of the screen. I still have a lot to go, but it shouldn’t be too hard. Once I’m done with this, I’ll start work on the main battle system; but I’ll talk about that next devlog.
Bonus Question
Which games have had controls you liked a lot?
Alonso Canales 