I've been continuing to chip away at my parkour game Freerunners and I wanted to show some of the gameplay progress I've been making!
Thanks to Steam Next Fest I had a bunch more people playing the demo and from that, I got a lot more feedback. Thanks to everyone who let me know their thoughts! One of the common feedback trends I picked up on was that the gameplay didn’t match the marketing message of “finding a flow” through your environment. In particular, using obstacles felt a bit stop, start-y to some people. Aka It didn’t feel as fluid as it should have been.
Old non-smoothed Obstacle Using
Here is what it used to look like, vaulting an obstacle (left video) and going under an obstacle (right video).
You can see how sometimes it looks okay but other times it seems to snap to the obstacle. This makes sense because, well that’s exactly what I was telling it to do ha. I was using a straight-up teleport to a specific location per obstacle to line up the using animation with the player/obstacle. It worked when you were close to the correct location it needed to be. However, if you were too far when the move was triggered it would give you that snappy feel to it. I wanted to fix this so I came up with a new system which you can see below:
NEW smoothed Obstacle Using
Here are similar situations vaulting and going under but using the new smoothing system.
Now instead of instantly teleporting the player to the required location, I simply move them over time to that location. The move takes place over literally 2 milliseconds but it really does make a big difference to the snapping problem. It’s funny this ended up being a lot easier and less buggy to implement than I thought it was going to be.
Playing the two methods back to back, it can be quite subtle at times but you can definitely “feel” the difference, which is cool. I’m super glad I took the time to make this change. It’s definitely taking the game in the direction I want it to go! If you enjoyed this break down go check out Freerunners on Steam!
PLAY THE FREE Steam DEMO HERE
Let me know what you think and give the game a wishlist if you like it!