Hey everybody, this week I was working on lots of stuff around the game, but not too much in the game.
New Website
I don't know if any of you checked the website before, but it was.... very bad.
Hover the spoiler to witness my shame ːsteamfacepalmː
Seriously? It's just a link to Discord and Steam and the placeholder logo! No pages, no formatting, why even have a website????
I spent some time this updating the website to be presentable. Still not amazing, but it has all the basic stuff now like the trailer, description, press kit and contact info. Check it out if you're interested:
www.pogochamp.bike <- Yeah it's a ".bike" domain... I thought that was funny.
Bug of the week
This week's top bug has to do with conveyor belts. At low speeds, conveyor belts seemed to work fine, but when I decided to make a level with faster belts I noticed that things got pretty weird.
Turns out there were a few different issues here, but the main one was that I was trying to overcompensate for the conveyor belt's speed. I had adjusted my calculations for things like sliding direction and jump height to act as if the conveyor belt was stationary, and the character was moving in the opposite direction of the belt. This caused some exciting issues like instantly bouncing hundreds of meters after gently landing on a belt, and the sliding you see in the gif above.
Basically my naive understanding of relativity / reference frames got the better of me.
Art!
I realized that I can't bump up the visual style of PogoChamp all on my own. I'm a mechanics focused developer, and I don't have the artistic skills to make this game look as good as it could. To that end, over the past week I got in contact with a variety of artists to help me figure out the visual style of the game. We're currently in the concept art phase, but as things come together I'll post updates with some of the artwork. I'm really excited to update the art style from "Unity Standard" to "Actually looks like a video game"!
Changelog
- Added new wall jump-based level.
- Increase the resistance of water, so you actually slow down.
- Remove conveyor force adjustment logic.
- Prevent low speed bounces from forcing you to jump if you don't input jump.
- Update the long-jump conveyor level to be beatable again now that conveyor logic has changed.
- Replays can now be deleted.
- Replay mode camera movement is no longer based on playback speed.
- Update "Point and Shoot" level so that the bounce is more consistent.
- Begin work on stats recording.
- Fixed a regression which caused an extra pogo to spawn when you crashed.