Yesterday, we reached our testing milestone! Unfortunately we haven't gotten enough feedback yet, I'll have to bother some friends xD

Regardless, I still polished some things I knew needed to be done. We officially have coyote time and wall jump extra cling time (giving the player a small extra window to jump or wall jump after leaving the platform or wall). For the wall slide, I used more of a "sticky keys" approach than coyote time. Something among these lines is a must-have in any platformer, but I always struggle a bit with it, it always seems to introduce a lot of bugs. In unity, I already had coded my custom scripts for this that I usually reuse, but here I had to do it all again. It was a bit frustrating, but it is working now, glad to have that out of the way.

I played around a lot in the enemy scenario and found a few things I didn't like;

1) It was hard to juggle the enemy, sometime when hit he would fly really far, others he would barely move. I realized this happened as a consequence of his trajectory before being hit, if he was coming down from a fall he would suffer a lot less knock back. This physically makes sense, but in video games sometimes it's better to cheat the laws of physics for a more stable and predictable result. So I made it so the enemy's velocity was set to zero right before being launched. I think it's much more satisfying to perform juggles now.

2)The enemy aimed too fast, sometime trying to dodge enemy shots I would jump and go for a divekick to approach from above, unfortunately the enemy would quickly aim up and shoot me. To fix this I made the enemy not aim at the player, but rather aim at the player's location a small amount of time ago. This made the combat feel much more approachable(literally).

3)I felt that sometimes I wanted to land and go for a slide right away. Sometimes I would press down too soon and end up dive kicking and landing on my feet, very frustrating. So now if you land after a divekick and are still pressing down, you will transition into a slide right away. This change makes the player a lot stronger, but it just feels too fluid to remove.

Other than finding and fixing flaws, I also added a new enemy type! It's a simple enemy that bounces around. It's pretty cool that you can slide under him during jumps. I should later add an armored variant that can't be killed to force more slides. You can test it in today's build by pressing 2.

Other than collecting feedback, the plan for next week is to go all  in on enemies, and maybe add some royalty-free sound and some particle effects. Next week Catralitos will be busy with University, and I have been neglecting some Uni work myself. I have to resist working on this a bit to also focus on my courses and thesis.

Don't forget to play the new build and leave some comments, good or bad.

See ya

#devtober