So the second day exploring Game Mechanics was so much inspiring. Time Control is a powerful tool to play with. You can think of it as an additional Dimension to help you make great puzzles.It emphasizes the fact that players learn faster with repetitive and clearly indentifiable patterns. Furthermore, the fun is clearly the fantasy of having super-hero powers.
Play the Interactive Study here : https://loganou974.itch.io/gms-day-2
What was technically tricky to do :
- Most documentation about how to handle this did not fulfill my expectations. Brackeys’ tutorial is really great but i wanted something more powerful that did not depend on a « timed-based history recording ». I, instead, created an « option » that permits to NOT record while the object is still.
- The targetted goal was to empower « Time Control » Feel with powerful feedbacks. i, then, spent most of my time trying to reach this experience : Post-Processing manipulation, and especially Saturation modification in runtime was new to me and NOT intuitive at all.
- Music & Sounds manipulations according to the Time Control was easier than i thought (pitch = -2 to reverse) and i use a Particle System to create the gap between Real mode and Reverse-Time mode. Unfortunatly, this feature is not working on WebGL export…
- The most frustrating part : Building export for HTML5 (webgl) is extremely long and you may have specific errors. I had to rebuild several times because of minor bugs that only appeared in the navigator.
In the last minutes of the study, i though it would be fun to make a fragile platform that would fall making it impossible to climp up the wall without Time Control.
If i had more Time, i would have make Time Stop and maybe Time Acceleration ! I continue having fun learning about all of these special techniques.