The Adventures of Bob
This was a quick two week project where we built a platformer with world rotation as a major gameplay mechanic. We wanted to create a layered side scrolling experience, inspired by platformers like Little Big Planet and Fez.
I built mechanics designed levels for a short, but enjoyable, experience.
World Rotation
The world rotation took the most time out of this project. The camera loosely follows the player and will recenter on the player after movement stops or after a rotation.
Smoothing out the recentering became very tedious. To prevent the player from outpacing the camera, we decided to use checkpoints that freeze the player and level to cinematically rotate and center the camera on the player. Adjusting the variables for rotation speed and pause length as well as the recentering speed took some time and a large amount of play testing.
Obstacles
Each teammate contributed a unique level, all of them are fairly brief with varying mechanics and obstacles for each.
On my own level, I added falling platforms that had a second delay before dropping. This was accomplished using a coroutine in C# to enable “isKenematic” in Unity’s physics, after a wait determined by a float, to allow the platform to drop with gravity.
For a teammate’s level I helped add boulders their own platforming obstacles. The boulders ran our death script on collision which would wait a second before resetting the level. I wrote this script to disable player movement before resetting so that dying would be a less disorienting event.
Splash Screen and Menus
This project provided necessary practice for me to make functional UI elements for both the main menu and pause menu.
Our team name was “Gravity Games” so I made a splash screen with an animated galaxy and our team name positioned just under the galaxy center.