Devlog 08: A Retrospective Look at Movement Mechanics

Hi everyone, this is TR from The Day The Sky Fell. It has been 3 months since the game was first started in pitch and development, and along the way, there have been numerous changes on the core movement system, which is climbing. As you may have known that our game revolves around climbing extensively as a mean of traversing the upside-down city of Tokyo, the movement mechanics and level design are two interdependent elements when it comes to the making of this game. Although  the development has been closed up at this stage, it would be cool to envision how the game would have been by looking back specifically at the evolution of climbing, and doing so would also serve as a good reflection on analyzing the hits and misses on each of the changes.

Pitch Phase

Originally, the game was designed to be a small-scaled project with heavy emphasis on run-n-jump style platforming to explore the city of Tokyo. So right off the back, we did not plan to contain too many climbing movements, and those that were brought up appeared to be very independent from each other, where we only intended to use them to connect different platforming sections of the game. Going by type, we have the following:

Ladder:

• up and down along a ladder
• jump off from a ladder at any point

Ledges:

• sideway movement on a ledge
• pull itself up a ledge
• drop down from a ledge
• drop down from a platform to grip onto the ledge
• jump and grab onto a ledge

Powerline:

• sideway movement along a power line
• climbing down from a light pole and transitioning onto a power line

Pre-alpha Phase

As one may have guessed, we soon ran into finding that the flow of gameplay a bit too plain if the focus was solely run-n-jump platforming. This motivated an expansion on climbing move sets to includes the following transitions.

Ledges:

• 90 degree turn on a ledge
• transition between disconnected ledges
• animation transition from hanging to bracing

With the inclusion of those new movement mechanics, level's dimension is no longer restricted to a linear route or just a plane. Multi-pathing options and variation in core gameplay flow are expanded to what they are right now.