All Over the Place

GOODNESS this devlog covers a variety of changes and learndings.  Where to begin?

So I think last time on Dust Bunny Sweeper, I mentioned that next up I planned on adding obstacles to higher levels, in addition to some UI and audio juice, and the thing I was most excited about (still am), dust bunny variants.  Wellll...what actually happened was that I did indeed finish my half started implementation of adding obstacles to higher levels.  

And then I tested it.  And I hated it.  I hadn't predicted that dustbunnies can spawn underneath obstacles, and hadn't yet implemented any method for getting bunnies out from under things.

SO I *cough cough* abandoned my juice aspirations for a minute, ripped out all the new things, and dove into creating and testing dust bunny variants instead.  And this has largely been exactly as fun as I expected it to be, although I also ran into a wall of consequences for a decision I made long before starting this game in the process.

You see the original Stoven Universe was made for the player to take on a dustbunny-sized perspective.  To achieve this, my sweetheart/dev partner AdjectiveBeaver and I decided to scale the entire world up x 10 around the player.  That way we wouldn't have to scale forces and distances and mmmm everything else mathy relative to the scene, but could keep it all relative to the player instead.

When I imported the scene assets I wanted to use for Dust Bunny Sweeper, well, I conveniently forgot about all that relative scale nonsense.  Somehow I failed to wonder why I had to crank up base level broom controller speeds so high, and just kept on trucking until I put a fun lil bouncy material on a new dustbunny variant and... nothing happened.  

So, to make a long story just a bit longer, I spent the past week overanalyzing all the wrong things (again) to try and figure out what was wrong.  Anyway, what you have here is an update that feels much bigger (har har) to me than it will to you, dear player.  What's new:

• SPRINT, toggled via C key or gamepad left-stick press, *although I can't advise it (yeah, don't ask me why I went there instead of many other things I had planned to do).  Due in part to the same exact issue with having everything be 10 x bigger than the calculations, sprinting just makes you roll right over dust bunnies.  I mean, it's also because character controllers are built to smoothly evade small bumps in the floor geometry, and I need to figure out how to basically invert that behavior.
• Jump, toggled via Spacebar or gamepad button South (again, this serves no purpose yet, I can't explain myself).
• Three WIP dustbunny variants in levels 3, 4, and 5 (I won't spoil what they do here.)
• Introduced a fun bug (I won't spoil that either.)

Next up:

• Updating instructions, and showing the objective in its place on each new level load.
• Crouch (this is already working, just didn't make it into the build), so maybe I can re-implement obstacles.
• New types of challenge (not just obstacles) and the aforementioned level objectives.
• Refining current dustbunny variants, adding more.
• Maybe some juice.