Investigating how the player charges

I did a lot of non-game work this week and weekend, so unfortunately there's no build this week. I am looking into some feedback I recently got from some playtesters. I was glad to see that the game has gotten a lot easier to control, and people seem to be getting close to finishing the game in one sitting comfortably.

While I'm managing difficulty fairly well, I could be doing better. There are later levels in the game which, while not too difficult puzzle-wise, are pretty difficult execution-wise, which causes a difficulty spike that I didn't factor in.

I'd love to make it easier for players to charge multiple times in quick succession. I think I want to revise how the player's charge attack builds up and lets off to address that. This also means changing how the force is applied to the player during that charge. I think these changes will actually involve me removing some over-complicated systems, so this might make the game more stable, actually.

There's also a bug I've been getting since updating Unity where the linked goal nodes in just one level won't always fire properly. That's going to vex me for a bit.

Oh! And next week is GDC, so I will probably miss the next two weeks of updates!

Back to the Blog

It's been a while! The new build is right here

Sorry for being out of commission for so long. My computer was out of commission for a little bit a few weeks back and I haven't really been on the ball about doing Unity work since then. To be honest, I'm really considering moving on to the next project for this blog. I'll still work on Pierce of course, I want to release it eventually. But for the purposes of this blog, I really need to be doing something useful each week. And that hasn't been true for a while. I want to use this blog to experiment more, so at the end of this month, after I'm back from the Game Developer's Conference, I'll try to work more on tutorials and experiments.

Not much changes with this build - I fixed three minor bugs, one of which came up as I updated to a new Unity Version. There seems to be another unity bug happening on certain levels. I'll see if I can get it to happen more reliably and fix that bug as well.

The audio designer I have helping me is still working on new sound effects for charging, but for now the charge-up noise is still by Javier Zumer. I use and modify this asset under this license.