Balancing the character movement
Dev Diary 19
Hi everyone!
One of the things that surprised us in game development was the difficulty of setting the character movement just right. The physics simulation system we are using in Unity for our character is called rigid body. The character’s movement is affected by these parameters: mass of the body, gravitation and speed.
Here is a video with movement controls used at the ancient beginning of our game development. You can see it’s not very responsive, which wouldn’t be good for level obstacles that need quick precision. It’s slow and kind of has the feeling that you're walking on the Moon.
For the ideal movement settings, we decided on a “tighter” controls. They’re better suited for our level design, where you need maximal precision. The gravitational force affecting the character is higher, which causes a quicker fall and a quicker jump. It doesn’t leave the player much time to react and that makes the game more dynamic.
In this video, you can see the movement controls we are using now versus movement controls with lower/higher values of the movement affecting parameters (gravity, body mass).
