Considering alternative view & movement

Safer than Professor Rex's office hours
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blueblimp
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Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2018 4:13 am

Considering alternative view & movement

Post by blueblimp »

First off, this game is amazing. Being a full-fledged puzzle game teaches the player an intuitive grasp of the concepts.

That said, the view & movement schemes can be awkward at times. Here I'd like to quickly explore some possible ideas, some of which would only be suitable for a different game, but it seems as sensible a place to put them as any.

View

Imagine that the player avatar is a spaceship with a navigation computer. What should the navigation computer show to the player to help them navigate?

The navigation computer can't show the Measured view, because that view shows information from distant points that hasn't actually reached us yet (because of speed of light limit). The best the computer can do is show the most recent information it has seen.

On the other hand, showing the spatial distortion of the room does not seem very helpful, especially in Seen mode, where it gets pretty crazy. It would be more convenient for the computer to always show the room the same and instead distort the raptor.

The end result is a view that, spatially, is simpler even than Measured mode, but, temporally, is similar to Seen mode. A nice gameplay benefit is that this would make time distortion easier to see. The downside is that you don't get to enjoy trippy spatial distortion.

Movement

The movement in the game is kind of like Asteroids, in that you get low, constant acceleration in any direction you choose, with no friction. The important exception is being able to stop instantly using spacebar.

This movement scheme is very awkward, which is probably why most games don't control like Asteroids. A more common way to control is for the player avatar to quickly accelerate to a maximum speed, and if the player stops pressing any direction, stop moving. To express it physically, this is loosely like drag.

I'm guessing that the Asteroids-esque movement scheme is used because, with large acceleration, the spatial distortion would change too fast. Indeed, we can see that happen when pressing spacebar. So, using a more standard game movement style would be best paired with the view suggestion above, which would only feature the raptor changing distortion quickly, not the whole room.
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