Devlog 5 - Water/Air Jump Prototyping

Published: June 18th, 2021

No technical deep dive this week -- instead I just wanted to post a video showing off some new mechanics that I've been prototyping.

The first new mechanic is "water sections" where the scroll rate of the song slows down:

I haven't completely decided how to use this yet. In the video above I've done some playing around with making these sections feature triplet meter as a way of making the rhythms more interesting, but I'm not too sure I'll stick to that as most of my other mechanics aren't built for it and it doesn't seem to have a ton of depth. Perhaps that might be better as a separate type of enemy?

So right now it's mainly just an aesthetic thing that changes the feel of that section of music. It also does slows down your jump speed, as that seemed to fit nicely, so jumps are two beats instead of one. The key is going to be building the music in a way that makes sense with these sections (halftempo drums, pitch shifting, etc). This will probably be more of a one-world gimmick than a mainstay mechanic for the entire game.

Visually I've reused the water shader from level 1-3, which uses simple sine wave patterns to offset the drawn texture. For capturing the input to the shader, you could use a GrabPass, but I instead chose to implement this by using a Render Texture.

For each underwater section, there's a separate camera which grabs what would be shown on the screen and writes it to a Render Texture. There's then a simple rectangular quad Mesh Renderer that draws the Render Texture on top of everything else using my water shader. (Of course, this quad should to be invisible to the water camera)

It's important that the quad is drawn above everything else, but unfortunately, Unity doesn't actually expose the 2D sorting order of the Mesh Renderer component in the inspector. Luckily, you can expose it using an editor script: see https://gist.github.com/pavel-fadrhonc/ecbe4ff18e1a4a38a62214bbab69a0e2

There's some other things that I could do to get this looking nicer (bubble particles, color tweaks, better "splash" animations), but this is working fine for now.

The next set of things that I've been working on is mid-air jumps and the ability to support various complex combinations of jumping and flying. The mid-air jumps were simpler to implement than the press-and-hold flight paths, and I actually had them working a while ago, but the code was pretty old and needed to be brought back up to speed to function properly again.

This is where you can really see the rhythms start to get more complex. Obviously I wouldn't throw players into this sort of dense pattern right off the bat; these sequences were designed to test my level generation code more than anything else.

Getting all of this working involved a bunch of changes to the level generation code, as there were previously a lot of assumptions being made there that are no longer true with these combinations. I'll have to continue to clean this up in the future as well -- it's an ongoing process as I add in more features and learn more about the best way to structure things. Fortunately, it seems to be in pretty decent shape so far.

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