Project Starfall
This is a 2D Metroidvenia project I worked on in college for about a year which has been in development by Neon Origins. This is an Indy company which specializes in teaching new game developers how to work on big projects in large teams.
Residual Jump Force
23/10/2024
Our team eventually decided to do a user test to figure out how players would experience our game and all its mechanics/ features. A complaint we heard a lot was "The jump doesn't feel very responsive" which was probably true, but the game already had a jump buffer and coyote jump. When looking at our users' gameplay we realized that players would usually jump too high because our game didn't have any controlled jump height. This is why I decided to work on a residual jump force system which makes it possible for the player to jump less high when the player presses the jump button for a short amount of time.
I created the residual jump force system by checking if the player stopped pressing the jump button while the player was still jumping. I added a force downwards in this situation to cancel the jump without the player losing all their momentum out of nowhere.
Checkpoint System
13/06/2024
Creating the checkpoint system was a lot more complicated than expected. Coding a checkpoint doesn't sound super complicated but I couldn't just start coding like usual because the team and I weren't sure how it was going to be made. We decided to create a small group to discuss about what the best options would be for our checkpoint system. Eventually we all agreed to a system that would work for the game making it possible for me to start coding it.
The checkpoints have three states. The first state is called "Deactive" which means the player hasn't reached the checkpoint yet. The second state is the "Active State" which means the checkpoint is the last checkpoint the player activated. The last state is called the "Idle State" which means the checkpoint was activated by the player but isn't the last checkpoint the player activated.
This was useful because we wanted to make a system in the future that warps players to previously activated checkpoints. This makes it possible for the player to navigate through the game more quickly and find new areas without getting bored of backtracking.
