Welcome back to our recap of the work we’ve been doing on our little project. We’re glad to have you here, and we have interesting stuff to share with you:

After our last Devlog got us going in the right direction, we’ve been hard at work at improving our game’s core mechanic: synchronous movement, and have finally settled on a solution that we think is the most balanced for our needs.

But first, we need to talk about a new mechanic. This new mechanic allows you to select your primary character, whose input is directly mapped to the user input, as opposed to the secondary character, whose input is inverted. This helps with user interaction in situations where you want to focus on one character over the other, especially if that character had its controls inverted.

Now, the idea we’ve come up with consists of a “partial synchronization mechanic”.  What does this mean in Layman’s terms?  Well, we’re glad you asked.  At first, both characters will be completely and absolutely synced in terms of their movement (minus the Y axis) by default. This means that if a character can't move in one direction, the other will be unable to move as well in its equivalent direction. This mode is called "Sync" mode.

Here comes the interesting part. If you press a specific key, you will be able to temporarily control only your selected character, leaving the secondary character standing still in its position. The catch is you will have a stamina bar that starts to deplete after you do this. if this bar fully depletes, we want the character to return to its original position, or start losing health, or both (it’s not fully decided yet). This is called "Async" mode.

This opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of level design, without compromising entirely to fully or non fully synchronized mechanics, and as a team, we’re going to try to capitalize on this fact.

On a final note, we also implemented a basic prototype for an enemy character, whose AI needs to be worked on, but at least it’s being worked on. 🙂

  (A terrifying enemy indeed)

Also, as a consequence of all the character control changes, a rework on how characters are managed was needed. In this regard, both characters now share the same code, and are bound to a single “Character Controller” node. This simplifies future development on movement features. (And it’s not as messy xD)

That’s been it for this time. We’re thankful for your interest, it drives us to actually do stuff, and means a lot to us. Next, we’re planning to actually develop some levels that can be played (Pretty important in a game lol), and other related work. 

Goodbye, and see you later.