Now with company
My second unity project I have made, this time in a group. We were tasked to create a game with the theme "Space", so we settled on making a gravity switching platform about the space dog Laika. I got to make the camera and help with the gravity flip mechanic.
The Room Manager
One thing I really wanted to learn was camera placement. At the start of the project I wanted to make sure that you go through the level
room-by-room. The camera would zoom in or out depending on what room the player is in, making sure the player has all the information they need so they don't have to make leaps of faith's. This sounds great on paper but was still tough to execute in practice, there are still plenty of times where the players jumps off a platform only to be met with the loving arms of an enemy that wandered in off-screen. The camera does a servicable job aiding the player.
Gravity Flip
The Gravity Flip early on was quickly decided as the game's main gimmick, the main problem with the Gravity Flip was deciding how it would be used. Can it only be used on the ground or in the air? Can you re-flip yourself in the air? Does the Gravity Flip completely replace the jump button or are players still allowed to jump?
Arguments kept getting made, but eventually we decided on Laika being able to flip gravity only on the ground and being able to jump.
Making the Gravity Flip had it's own problems, the biggest one that we couldn't save was Laika's sprite not looking at the correct direction.
When Laika is walking on the ceiling, instead of looking at which direction the player is looking at, Laika looks at the opposite direction. To this day we have not figured out how to fix this. We decided to leave it as is, since the Gravity Flip did work and the visual problem looked goofy, we decided to name it "The Moonwalk".
(You can see the full code over on the game's github page)
(Note: The original project file got corrupted due to a git merge error, this link will re-direct you towards to our backup github page instead)