Shooting, Dimension Transition & Experiments

By Edgar

This week we focused on making our proof of concept and testing the decisions we made last week.

Proofs of Concept

Movement & Shooting Proof of Concept

Movement

After experimenting further with the plane controls, we decided that it was too complex. The roll aspect didn’t give the player any mechanical advantage but gave them one more thing to manage. It was quite disorienting to be sideways or upside-down so the player would always have to make sure they were upright. Since we expect the game to be incredibly stressful and have lots of aspects to be thinking about, we didn’t want to add another mechanic for so little trade-off.

We decided to implement a new control system where the player’s model is always perfectly horizontal and rotates to face the direction of the look input. To access the vertical dimension, we added inputs to move the player up and down.

Shooting

We added shooting for the player and some bullet trail VFX to get an idea of how so many projectiles would look like covering the screen.

2D Perspective

We added the ability to switch to 2D. There currently is no transition between the dimensions, and this highlighted how important a transition animation is. Without the transition, the switch is very jarring and disorienting. We also noticed there was an issue with the scale. The player becomes very small in 2D compared to the bullets and the turnips because of the difference in perspective and orthographic camera.

Dimension Transition & Enemy AI Proof of Concept

We wanted to experiment with some of the decisions we made last week, so we made a separate project in Unity to experiment. We mainly wanted to test the following:

• Ground based movement instead of free flight
• Obstacles interacting with different dimensions
• Side-view for 2D instead of top-down

We also used this separate project to make basic proof of concepts of enemies and dimension transition.

Enemy AI

Since our enemies were inspired by sea creatures, we also wanted them to imitate some of their behaviours. One significant behaviour we thought would be interesting was flocking behaviour, like a school of fish. We have a basic implementation of that in this project with the enemies chasing the player in groups.

Dimension Transition

We implemented a transition between the dimensions. To make a smooth transition, we moved the camera back while decreasing the FOV, then finally switching to an orthographic camera at the end of the transition.

Experimentation Conclusions

As expected, the ground-based movement didn’t allow for much vertical movement. The 3D perspective didn’t feel like it would offer much more mobility compared to 2D.

The dimension-specific obstacles were interesting, but we realized that they are only interesting in the side-view transition. The top-down view offered a much more confusing obstacle system that we didn’t want to deal with. Not only that, we still had the concern of adding too many mechanics for the player to think of.

The side-view didn’t feel good to use. Even with free-flight, it didn’t seem like it captured the feel we were going for. We did notice that the transition felt very smooth. The top-down transition would be much harder to make smooth, so this tells us to pay more attention to the transition in the future.

This experiment made us more confident in our decisions and gave us insights into what we can do regarding dimension transition.

Future Plans

• Enemy AI and movement
• Collisions for 3D and 2D/1D
• Dimension transition
• VFX for shooting
• Main music theme