This Village scene will act as a sort of hub for the player, returning here between levels to do various things:

• Return after obtaining new movement abilities, to reach areas of the village that they previously couldn’t
• Obtain new information about the stars
  • To navigate to new islands
• Meet NPCs who teach them about the stars and/or provide new movement abilities

Game inspiration

Spiritfarer is a beautiful 2D game that also takes place on a variety of islands, which we’ve researched on our Miro board:

From researching Spiritfarer’s islands there were a few things I took away:

• Certain areas were locked behind certain things like keys, they were shown to players early despite being inaccessible until the player progresses further and returns
  • This reminds me of a common trope of metroidvanias, which we could use in Haerenga – as the player unlocks new abilities as the game progresses
• To compliment the side-scrolling camera, these islands had varying levels of parallax
  • Layers included:
    • Player layer (Would move at the same rate as the player character)
    • Background layer 1 (Larger and more faded trees would move slower relative to the camera)
    • Background layer 2 (Large mountains and clouds in the distance would move extremely slowly relative to the camera)

Camera

This scene will differ from the rest of the game quite a bit as the majority of the platform sections take place in a single room that fits entirely on the screen. Whereas the village will have a side-scrolling camera, so I need to create a side-scrolling camera system:

Firstly I created a Cinemachine camera to follow the player:

Then, to allow the camera to stay within a fixed box (and prevent it from showing areas that aren’t meant to be seen), I created a clamp area and gave it a box collider 2D. Then, in the Cinemachine camera, I gave it a Confiner 2D component and assigned the clamp area gameobject:

Parallax

Throughout development so far, I’ve used an orthographic camera. But in most 2D games that have parallax, they use a perspective camera and then place their assets at different z axis. Because if this I have to create a script that increase an asset’s offset relative to the camera when the camera moves.

I created two floats ‘parallaxX’ and ‘parallaxY’ and confined them to 0 and 1. These floats dictate how far an asset with this script will move in the X and Y axis relative to the camera. A value of 1 will result in no parallax while 0 means the gameobject will move extremely far relative to the camera.

Planning Village Houses

The village houses are meant to act as a sort of barrier to prevent the player from reaching certain paper pieces for star information if the player doesn’t yet have the required movement ability. Because of this, I need the house assets to be certain heights:

1. High enough to jump on
2. Too high to jump on but able to grapple on
3. Too high to jump on or grapple on but can wall climb up to

Because of these restraints, I need to communicate this to Paula so that she can make the correct assets neccessary: