Devlog #1: Player movement

Every platformer needs a player, and every player needs to be able to move, so player movement is usually the number 1 thing that needs to be nailed before a platformer can feel good to play. I started by creating the player's directional movement as it should be fairly straight forward, just simple left and right movement. After spending 30ish mins setting it up and refining it over and over I finally got movement to a point where it felt fairly good to control, it's got a nice sense of weight and thus movement to it which I believe helps it feel less rigid.

once basic movement was done it was time for the main attraction: the gravity switching mechanic! This went through a bunch of mechanical changes over the day or so that I was developing it. Originally it was almost like flying, you could change gravity at will and in all 4 basic directions as well as no restrictions or cool downs on switching or movement, but the huge issue with this was that it was so insanely game-breaking that there was no way I would've been able to design levels or challenges to work with that. So the solution was to dial it way, way back, only being able to change gravity on the Y axis and with a delay of 5 seconds between each gravity switch, but this felt sluggish and like an inferior version of VVVVVV's flipping mechanic, so on a whim I decided to add back the ability to flip the gravity horizontally as well, which ended up being an improvement though there was still a fair amount of work to go before it was considered "good". The next improvement that was made was changing the gravity switch cooldown from being after 5 seconds to resets on ground, this made the game much more forgiving while not being without its natural limits that can be designed for. At this point the arrow keys were used to move and Q was for vertical gravity swapping and E for horizontal gravity swapping, however this is really not a great control scheme, its weird and not at all comfortable or intuitive to use. So I changed move to be WASD and assigned each of the arrow keys to a direction for gravity, and this was the final thing needed to *really* get the controls feeling nice to use, though you couldn't move at all on horizontal surfaces so that needed a small fix but once that was polished up everything felt really nice to play, but dont just take my word for it, have a look for yourself:

(after some more testing I discovered that gravity is pretty static but that'll be fixed asap)

I did get a little *too* carried away with trying to absolutely perfect movement before being ready to get tests of the movement by others so I currently don't have any external feedback on the game's controls & movement but that's a small bump in the grand scheme of things that will be quickly sorted and fixed!

See you in the next devlog!