Mad Meddlers version 13.3 released! Fixed the horrible movement.

Mad Meddlers version 13.3 comes with 2 major changes. More responsive movement and character attacks push the player forward or down.

It was pointed out to me that the movement for the game was stiff, slippery, and janky by a fellow fight game dev who is working on Parable Academy. He is also the same guy who pointed out an error in platforms which led me to make phase-through platforms in the last update. 

I did not see it until I really focused on the running movement and tested how responsive it felt by running in a circle using the joystick to see if the character could change direction quickly. 

Indeed, the running in a circle test result was very bad. The character was supposed to run in a circle, but the responsiveness was so bad that he just stayed still and rotated. 

I fixed this by increasing the base speed for characters and made acceleration and deceleration smooth linear lines using linear interpolation. The running in a circle test was passed with a good result. This made me realize that this smooth acceleration and deceleration  is very similar to how a car operates. A car does not instantly accelerate to a certain value and then stop immediately when the brake is pressed. That would be dangerous and leave very little room for error. Also people would not have a comfortable period of time to change their decision or direction. The same concept applies to movement in games. The concept of giving people enough time to change their decision is what makes the jump in A Hat in Time feel responsive and free. A Hat in Time does not make you commit to moving in a certain direction when jumping, but rather the game lets you change direction during jump and adds a double jump to let players correct any mistake in estimating jump height.

In addition to making input responsive for movement, I improved the friction to make the character traction factor have a significant impact on how much a player slides when coming to a stop. Thankfully, this change also made the long jump to crouch input produce a slide movement to function as a sort-of wavedash to move the player away or towards opponent in varying distances depending on input and character traction.

Edit:

I forgot to mention this. I added an attack velocity parameter to attacks in order to make a character slide forward when doing a crouch attack or make a character do a ground pound when he is falling. Ophelia has a new slide crouch attack that makes her do a slide with a kick similar to the classic Mega Man games. Sun Man has a ground pound now for fast fall attack that locks him into falling down at a fast speed similar to Mario's ground pound attack.

Edit 2:

Thank you and shoutout to the Parable Academy game dev. Try his game demo on steam.