Jumping and Landing Feedback

I spent some time improving the visuals for jumping and landing. One minor tweak that I did was to alternate the jumping animation so that each time the player jumps the animation will be mirrored horizontally. This keeps the animation for jumping from looking too repetitive when the player makes a quick sequence of jumps.

I also implemented a few feedbacks from the Feel asset. The first feedback that I implemented was squash and stretch on landing. When the player lands they will squash down in the Y-axis and stretch out in the X and Z axes. While working on this I wanted a more subtle effect for short falls and a larger effect for high falls. I added a "hard fall" velocity to the player movement controller to accomplish this. If the player hits the ground above a certain velocity threshold it will count as a hard fall. Hard falls have a different set of feedbacks. There is also an event that is fired whenever a hard fall occurs. Currently, this event is used to briefly prevent player movement input which adds to the impression that the player was hurt by the fall. In the future, I'd like this event also to be picked up by a health system to damage the player.

I also added several particle systems for jumping and landing. Jumping uses two particle systems: one that creates a ring of puff particles where the player left the ground and a second that creates a trail of puff particles at the player's feet as they jump. Soft landings have a small ring of puff particles. Hard landings have a large ring of puff particles as well as a ring of start particles.

The final feedback that I added was a screen shake on hard landings. This is a brief high-amplitude, low-frequency 6-D shake that adds impact to hard landings. I'm feeling happy with the basic movement at this point. There is still a lot of polish that I could add, but I think the current state of player movement is good enough to proceed with expanding the game mechanics and test level.