These last weeks we heavily reworked the locomotion of our playable character - Groove. Today we’ll talk about these changes and how they affect the game: this friday you will be able to try our new build on Itch.io and tell us your thoughts... but first of all let’s list what our objectives have been from the start:
- Groove must feel controllable at nearly all times.
- Both when fighting and when platforming it must feel fluid and agile.
- Aerial control is needed to properly fight in air. It shouldn't be a challenge to hit enemies in the air.
- Groove has superpowers. Groove is the Ruler Queen of Air.
In order to achieve the gameplay SLICE BACK aims to, we needed to validate all these objectives. We felt Groove was quite controllable and that she could fight in the air comfortably, but both agility and punch were lacking. I mean, she literally has gotten super powers! Who the heck jumps like this after gaining superpowers?
Old locomotion
Harold organized a secret meeting and we traced an attack plan. While the main goals were to fix the agility and punch, the idea was to improve the overall quality. The key conclusions were the following:
- [GENERAL] Make movements more punchy, less linear. Groove is explosive!
- [GENERAL] VFXs! Superpowers are showy, even if Groove’s ain’t that much.
- [GENERAL] Tune our aid system to help get close to those puny aliens when jumping or dashing.
- [JUMP] Aimable to a certain degree and more direct. No more slow parabolas to reach your destination!
- [GRAVITY] Reduce the time Groove takes to reach the floor (no more of that floaty feel!) while giving a brief room of time after each air action before accelerating too much.
- [ANIMATION] Improve several locomotion animations to make them feel more impactful.
We had to rework many aspects of the locomotion system, which led to other small modifications and tweaks that we believe improve the overall experience of playing SLICE BACK and gets us closer to reach our objectives.
New locomotion
We look forward to keep improving the game and hearing your opinion about these changes when we release the build in Itch.io this Friday!
Remember that you can always contact us through our Twitter, chat with us on our Discord and be always updated on our development progress through our newsletter.
Cheers,
The Slice Back team