Player Movement (Devlog Week 8)

This is the first official devlog for my game Flappy Freak: The Flappening and it will showcase the player movement within the game and it will also explain the movement style for this style of game.

The player is a variety of characters but initially is flappy bird. This version of the Flappy Bird sprite is used from a online version of the game and the sprite sheet of the character can be found here: [1] 

This is the character in action in the GIF format:

The animation for this character, i initially used the slice tool on the spritesheet for Flappy Bird to make it three different sprites. Then, i made the character animation using the animation window tool where i placed the three different sprites and had them change every few frames. this process was quite simple since the player only moves in one direction and the movement of the player is automatic. I am in the middle of implementing the animation of the player heading head first to the ground as they are falling towards the ground as that was in the original game of Flappy Bird but i have been unable to implement it as of yet.

The progress between starting the project and from this devlog consist of: 

• The player game object with animated sprites, a script called movement which allows the player to move forward towards the goal, multiple components like rigidbody2d, polygon collider, sprite renderer and animator. The rigidbody2d has its gravity set to 1 which allows the player to 'jump'.
• The game allows for support from keyboard, mouse and controllers but some of the feedback i received have told me that the wrong button was selected for the control then i intended for controller so i will have to fix that. 
• The ground work for the levels which was made by splicing the spritesheet into  12 equal parts and using the tile palette tool to insert the tiles and also includes boundaries so that players do not leave the intended area of play. 
• A cinemachine to follow the player as the character is moving towards the goal and it also has boundaries so that the camera does not show anything out of bounds

A Demo of the game can be seen here: 

The feedback received from many members of my tutorial group consisted of comments saying that the player isnt stationary when starting the game which makes it hard to start the game and not die instantly. Another issue that was found by members was that the player would lose speed when interacting with the ceiling boundary. Other then that, the overall comments were positive about the game and i am very appreciative of that.  Within the next week, i plan on fixing some of the issues listed here and adding the obstacles of the level so that there is an actual game to play other then a demo. 

REFERENCES:

Dong Nguyen (Original Creator)

Samuel Cust (Supplying the Sprites) [1]

https://github.com/samuelcust/flappy-bird-assets [1]

https://flappybird.ee/blog/category/assets/

https://flappybird.ee/blog/textures/

[Accessed 17th April 2023]