Devlog 1- Player Movement

This is the first devlog for Escape from the Count’s Mansion, and it focuses on the player movement system.

As outlined in the initial Game Concept Devlog, the player character is envisioned as a man holding a flashlight, exploring a dark, eerie mansion. While the final sprite art is still in development, for now, a placeholder sprite is used to test the core gameplay mechanics—starting with movement.

The player flashlight is handled through a custom script in Unity using Unity's built in Global Light 2D. The script sets the world position of the light using the input direction of the mouse of the player, then using transform to place the light in the desired direction.

The flashlight movement as illustrated in the GIF below:

The player movement in the current prototype is handled through a custom script in Unity, inspirations taken from the EightWayMovement script and other movement scripts from past tutorials. This script allows the player to move in all four directions using the keyboard (WASD keys). Movement is controlled via Unity’s Rigidbody2D component to ensure physics-based interactions behave consistently. Gravity is disabled and rotation is frozen to keep the character upright and unaffected by unwanted physical forces, since the game is meant to have a top-down perspective.

The movement logic uses Unity's Input.GetAxisRaw() function, which ensures snappy and responsive controls by directly mapping player input to movement directions. The script then normalizes the movement vector, which allows for consistent speed even when moving diagonally, and applies it using MovePosition on the Rigidbody2D inside the FixedUpdate().

Player movement illustrated in the GIF below:

Right now, there’s no animation tied to the character, but that’s planned to change soon with added animations from left, right, down and up movement, as well as animation for the flashlight. Some issues at the moment include the lack of working tilemap collider where the player simply phases through walls. The player currently moves freely in any direction, unlike a grid-based system.  The plan is to keep this system as it allows for smoother and more responsive gameplay, however this may change to a more grid-based and restrictive movement where the player movement directions are fixed, to add a more difficult twist to the game.

Initial feedback from playtesting has been positive, with testers noting that the movement is currently as noted in the initial vision of the game in the Game Concept Devlog but further feedback will be noted once enemies with behaviour are added to the game. Playtesters have also noted their fondness of the current flashlight system and are hoping for a more responsive flashlight for a more immersive gameplay mechanic.

Future plans include improvement of visual feedback of movement such as added player footsteps and sounds of the flashlight, to add to the spooky nature of the game.

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ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/ : used only to polish grammar and sentence structure.