I’ve been working on my 3D platformer, but when people play test it they find the actual platforming part hard to control. I am using the thirdpersoncontroller from unity assets - is there a guide or a book out there that walks you through fair level design and player mechanics? I don’t even know what I should be targeting
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I’ve never made a game and I don’t know what your game looks like, but I would consider two things:
-Add a shadow under your character that is always cast straight down so that it helps the player navigate their XY position, even if they are jumping
-Something that you can notice in Mario games is that the camera follows the player in the XY position, but doesn’t move up and down much when jumping. I think this helps the player see where they are about to land.
i like the last observation about mario!
For stuff like this it’s a good idea to look at other games. Watch some Mario odyssey gameplay in slow motion and pay attention to little details like how fast the character accelerates and how much you can turn in the air. You should be able to create a bunch of variables like this for your game and then tweak them until it feels right. You can setup a really tricky platforming section and then see how easy it is with different settings. Come up with some profiles and have people play test to find what works for the average person.
definitely something i’m doing! it’s important to see how everyone else does it but it’s very hard to quantify what exactly makes these other options so good
That’s why it’s important to do some kind of testing to quantify the differences. If you can make a jump 9/10 times with one setting and 5/10 with another then you know which gives you better control.
Most important though is feel. Which settings are going to give movement the best feeling.
Golden rule of platforming is that its about timing.
Don’t fall into the trap of making your “hard” jumps the ones where you have to perfectly jump at the last possible frame and then barely scrape your toe on the other ledge to make the jump.
It’s about consistent jumps, predictable arcs, and intuitive falls, and then slowly adding pressure to the player to make them correctly execute where to land while correctly predicting when they’ll land.
Your levers are:
- Technical execution - vary the complexity of command chains (eg jump, then dash, then swoop)
- Accuracy of prediction - vary the window of time that the correct movement will land safely (eg platform moves left and right on a loop)
- Finite preparation - limit the time they can plan their next move, or the info they have of what’s ahead (eg a series of platforma crumble when you step on them, or lower the visibility distance in a section)
So if people say it controls bad it’s because they’re not being tested on these things. If you’re looking for help in the actual movement, you want to think in terms of dampening and acceleration - how quickly does the character become predicable to control from a standing start? The longer they take to speed up and slow down, the higher you are setting your second two levers .
