This week we spent a lot of time doing fine grained, delicate tuning and hard and fast churning on game content. In game development they are really two different mindsets and can feel like you are going at two different speeds.
I spent a lot of time repeatedly casting spells at walls trying to get the friction, speed, and bounce to feel just right. To make testing faster, I created a debug console that allows me to do on the fly changes of a bunch of variables and see how they feel. See the following GIF. You will see this was one of my earlier attempts:
The speed is so high that the slow GIF frame rate doesn’t do it justice. It felt more like a Buster Keaton film and not quite what I was going for. In response I actually sped it up but upped the friction. That also was too fast but it was a different type of fast. It felt more like I was gliding on ice (note this might come in handy later)
Tuning is slow and can feel like you are not making much progress. I ended up with a value that was much closer to what I started with: a speed of 5.75 and a friction of 0.05.
I much prefer to churn on content creation. I have something to show for it at the end of the day, and it is exciting to see something that testers can get out of it.
The level in question is the graveyard world. Players have to negotiate a course of grave stones. Touching one spawns a zombie. Therefore you are encouraged to tread lightly and accurately.
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