Player Movement

Implementation

Implementing player movement was pretty straight forward for this project. A simple top-down 8-way movement system was needed to allow the player to move up/down, left/right, and diagonally.

Movement is changed from the velocity directly, and is calculated from a key press equaling 1 which is then multiplied by a speed multiplier.

I also added the functionality for different move speeds depending on the currently held weapon. I added this to allow for higher mobility with lower power weapons, and to make it harder to run from enemies whilst using powerful weapons.

Scrapped Ideas

I considered adding a gradual acceleration as the player starts/stops moving but decided against it as to keep the movement feeling snappy and responsive.

Feedback

From the feedback I received from testers they thought the movement felt too slow, even with the increased speed using lighter weapons. I will be tweaking the speed values throughout development as these are crucial for determining the overall feel of the game.