Player Movement

Player Movement Devlog

This is the first devlog for my game Last Stand and it's on player movement.

The player is a survivor and the sprite is from the practicals as well as the animations. 

The animation is show below:

The animation was done by slicing sprite sheet into multiple sprites and then using the animation window to animate the player where the sprite is set to play certain animation based on the direction the player is moving to. Making the player face the direction was done in blendtree and a script by using values from the input to determine the direction. 

For this checkpoint, I made the player move around the screen. The player can go either up, down, left, right as well as top-right, bottom-right, top-left, bottom-left. To implement this, I added a rigidbody2D to the player and set the gravity to zero and used the player movement script that was provided in the practicals. The speed can be changed in the inspector. The player is able to move in the direction from the corresponding key (WASD) and when pressed, it sets the velocity of the rigidbody2D to the movement speed set in an inspector using vectors. I modified the script that allow player to sprint by pressing Left Shift. The sprint speed is based on the multiplier to the normal speed, which can be changed in the inspector. Later in developing this game, I'll add a stamina aspect so player can only sprint a for limited time but stamina can recover. The alternative approach I considered was using transforms for velocity instead of vectors. 

The player sprint movement is shown in the GIF below:

The feedback I have received from various members in the game-feedback thread included statements saying that the player moves really nice and smooth and sprinting is a good speed. They were able to shoot the gun which I've forgot to turn off but gave some feedbacks on the player shooting when moving and the colour of the bullets. It seems they were pleased with how the player moved.  A planned improvement is to add sound effects for footstep to make it more immersive and giving audio feedback of the movement.