This week I've focused most of my time tweaking player movement to ensure I can make levels that will have a measured level of challenge to them.

I'm pretty happy with how the movement feels right now and have even developed a "jump ruler" to aid in designing levels.

I wrote a tool script in Godot that generates curves for an a approximation of the furthest and highest the player can jump so I can get a better idea of how the level will feel and what kind of challenge it will present before running it. Once I add a ruler to a level I can tap space and it'll snap to my mouse or i can hold space and it'll follow my mouse to get quick measurements of a jump.

I've added the ability to control how high the player jumps based on how long the jump button is pressed:

I'm hoping to allow for some more complex level designs with the ability to tell exactly where the player can go while also giving the player the ability to have finer tuned control of their movement.

You might be wondering what that mound of dirt with the flag in it was in the previous images. Other than just fine tuning movement, I have added a feature. Checkpoints!

With a plan for much larger levels than the first game, I hope checkpoints will help break the levels down into bite size chunks like the entire levels of the first game, but will allow for the feeling of accomplishment of beating a larger challenge when moving on to the next whole level.

One other thing that's not super noticeable is I completely rewrote the moving platform logic for more precise movement. Ensuring moving platforms will always completely reach either end of their path and wont go off track or out of sync with other moving platforms.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!