First week

The image above details the progress made to Rocket Wizard this week. it shows the character (white vertical rectangle in the middle) shooting white balls that hit the ground turning into a red explosion.

 The movement (left and right) is working in unity but there are significant problems making them work on itch, however the rocket-jumping mechanic is working quite nicely. Through various testing with other people, its' clear that some modifications will need to be made to the games gravity and slight aerial control adjustments to get the player movement feeling just right when trying to move around quickly in the air. Another issue is that you have to be quite precise with your mouse to get the exact angle you may want. Next week will be including various fixes to these issues, as well as some basic level design. With a level to play around in, I think it will make it easier to work out the exact player physics and aerial movement to make it feel just right.

In terms of the movement, there were some complications with getting the player to move and also be affected by the rocket explosion. Without going into too much detail, the first implementation of controls was basically setting the characters horizontal speed. this meant however when you weren't inputting a direction, the explosion had no impact on the players horizontal movement as it was set to 0, causing them to just go straight up into the air. The way around this was to instead have the movement keys apply a force to the player and implement a cap to the speed so you could't reach infinite speed. This approach  worked flawlessly in Unity, however on itch as mentioned previously, the characters horizontal movement keys to not work. I suspect the issue is related to this code and is hopefully addressed by next week.

The explosion, put simply, works by applying a force in all directions around it the moment it is spawned (spawned when the white bullets collides with terrain). There were some initial issues in testing where the explosions could affect the white bullets and other explosions, causing some unintentional chaos. This was easily fixed by making it so the explosions only affect the player character.