Creating the Movement Behind Nekiri’s Tail
- nekiristailgame
- Feb 9, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 23, 2020
Troy Nagel
When development on Nekiri’s Tail began, one of the main goals for the game play was to assist the player when traversing more precise areas of the game as the cat. These areas included slender ledges the player had to walk across as well as small surfaces the player needed to jump to and from. We wanted to create a system that prevented the player from making frustrating mistakes when traversing these surfaces while also still having them feel in control of their movement at all points during the game. Currently we have two movement mechanics being used, ledge walking and jumping.
After prototyping different solutions, we settled on a path point system for the traversing of slender ledges. The path point system was set up as multiple points laid out throughout a level that could be connected to each other in four ways: up, down, left, and right. These path points lock the player’s input movement in directions where there are no connections to other points, thus preventing the player from moving in a direction that would cause them to fall off of a ledge.
The main issue with this system was that the four directions we defined were not always the same as the direction the player is looking, resulting in it being unclear which direction they needed to move in to progress. Since the player’s camera could look in all possible directions, we decided to implement a dedicated camera for each path. These cameras follow the player as they walk along the path but have a limited rotation set on a per camera basis. The camera system came with the added benefit of being able to set up specific camera angles to perfectly fit the path.
The team wanted jumping to be limited to specific spots placed around levels and to be controlled to a degree so that jumping would never “miss”. We initially created a physics system where it would launch the player in the correct direction. However, adjusting the initial physics value and having to worry about collisions made this system inconsistent and not easily adjustable to our needs. We chose to instead create a system that would simply move the player between different points through a lerping of the beginning and ending positions. This allowed us to pinpoint exactly where the player would land for each and every jump in the game. Having a large amount of control on these starting and ending positions allowed us to create extremely precise jumps that communicate the cat’s agility to the player.
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