What a weird but original approach to a flashlight mechanic. I feel like I needed to adjust the responsiveness of the controls or something, as it was a bit difficult to move accurately. Nice job though, love the concept.
Viewing post in [GodotWildJam98] Social Signals jam comments
Sure, so take this with a grain of salt because player movement is really a personal taste thing, but from my perspective I felt that the player moved very rigidly/abruptly and at a speed where that was slightly jarring. I don't think the accelerate/decelerate style "platformer" movement is always appropriate but I think it would have felt nice in this game to have some feeling of momentum at the speed the player could move. If I wanted to tune it further than that I'd imagine the camera might feel better if it had slightly more logic to it, either following less rigidly or looking ahead of the direction you're moving in, perhaps. But that might not be helpful after adding acceleration. If you don't like the idea of the more "physics"ish movement, I think slightly slower movement speed would help in this one.
Anyway, all personal opinion obviously, but hopefully helpful to hear how someone else perceives it!
No I see what you mean and I agree. Thanks for taking time to write this !
I actually did this originally and had camera smoothing movement, but both resulted in the spotlight not following and being late on the character's movements. It gave an even more awkward feeling.
Maybe I should just remove the spotlight after the jam, I thought it was a way to convey how I (and a lot of autistic people) perceive the world detail by detail instead of something global (hence a different way to manage attention and notice things while forgetting totally other important things, or missing important info in our surroundings). But I also think it makes the game difficult to navigate so I'm unsure about this mechanic.
Maybe it's also due to the fact I'm very bad with shaders and it could be made so it adapts in a better way to the character's movements (and acceleration + camera smoothing).
Do you think after the jam I should look for a way to adapt the shader to smoother player and camera movements, or just remove the spotlight mechanic ?
Oh yeah using the built-in camera smoothing probably wouldn't work for this; I think you'd need custom logic that can be mirrored on the shader to get it to feel right. So it'd just be a bunch of extra work. Camera smoothing is also kinda hard to get right with low res pixel art games since it can end up being jerky and the feel of jumping to the next pixel is rough. There's ways around that too, obviously, but again it's more shader magic.
I do think that "spotlight" mechanic is the thing that makes this game feel unique, so finding the fun in it and tuning away as many of the problems in it as you can are probably worth whatever amount of time you're willing to spend on the game. But I think you could get 90% of the way there by something as simple as tweening the camera's position to follow the player's position and tying the spotlight position to the player's position instead of the camera's position so it tightly tracks the player sprite. I'd have to see how you put it together to be more helpful than that but I do think there's a chance you'd be able to find an easy and "good enough" solution that keeps the charm and helps the issues you want to solve. Good luck!