The Gruen Effect - Progress Devlog 1
I went through several iterations of movement to get to the one I landed on. The first was very slippery, when the player gave an input to change direction, they would drift along their current path for some time before starting a large arc to get to the right direction. To try and make things feel a bit more snappy, I made it so that if the player gave an input they would immediately stop before moving in the new direction.
This worked decently well, but the objects in the world were rendered in a way that was really jarring and just looked wrong. There were a few solutions to this problem that I mused about. The first of these was to take away any kind of overlap, having the player's entire sprite be able to collide with the entire environment. However, this ended up drastically restricting the space the player was allowed to move in, and with the slow start incorporated, it made traversing aisles quite a slog, and would have been even worse when there were obstacles. In the end I made each aisle have a respective collider that changed the player's layer order so that I could essentially tell the player "go under this object if you're in x place and over it if you're in y place" and still have an overlap.
However, this made me think about sideways movement in the aisle in general, and how the slow start made sideways movement painful, even with more space granted to the player. To amend this, I gave the player the ability to strafe (move sideways while continuing to face forwards and keep their momentum in that direction). This allows the player to make smaller movements without coming to awkward stops every time.
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