v0.2 - What's new?

• Fast Restart option
  • After three restarts, the player is now given the option to skip the intro cutscene when restarting 
• Mute button
• Slide on ramps to gain bursts of speed
• Use the slide button midair to fast fall
• Jump Animation
• Bugfixes 
• The player can no longer jump excessively high when jumping during a certain buffer window
• Pressing and releasing the jump button during the jump buffer no longer causes a full height jump
• Correctly applying minimum jump height
• Fixed rare occurrences of the player ghost desynchronising and clipping through the floor

Movement system rebuilt

With this update, we've completely overhauled Neon Shift's movement mechanics from the ground up (again). Previous versions of the game were using built-in physics components to handle collisions and velocity/acceleration. This made it easier to develop (and was extremely useful for the short game jam duration) but led to a movement system that felt a little unpredictable and was hard for us to get feeling just right. Instead, we're now using a player controller which uses raycasts for collision detection, and we simulate our own 'player physics' separate to the engine's built in physics components. This took a fair bit of work to convert but the improvement is pretty significant, making the player movement feel way more consistent and responsive. Going forward we should be able to more easily expand player systems (wall-running or maybe wall-jumping could be quite fun mechanics) and tune them more easily.

Improved sliding mechanic

The main gameplay addition this update comes in the form of improved sliding mechanics. Players now have the option to 'fast-fall' while airborne, cutting their jump short and descending much quicker than they normally would. This allows for more precise platforming and leads into the next big addition - ramp slides. Players are now able to achieve faster times than ever before by sliding down ramps to gain a surge of acceleration and a temporarily raised top speed. In previous patches, the player could reach comparable (but not quite as fast) times by taking advantage of the old movement system's physics to gain speed from jumping directly onto ramps, but this was too difficult and unreliable for most. With the proper integration of ramp sliding in this latest update, such times will now be accessible to players of a much wider range of skill levels, as ramp sliding is far more intuitive than the previous alternative. We feel that the game now feels more satisfying to play, and we've already seen some tricky manoeuvres being pulled off at record speeds throughout the more complicated areas of the level.

The next update and the future

For the next update (v0.3) we'll be continuing to work on improving the base of the game we have currently. We're hoping to push the next update more quickly. Now that we have the platforming mechanics and most of the base of the game sorted we'd like to take a little bit of time to refine what's there, add some polish, juice/effects and improve some of the UI elements a bit. We're also going to be adding our next gameplay feature - a slash attack. Once the player assumes the role of the chaser, they will have access to a slash attack. This will be the base for many mechanics but the main two to start will be to kill the ghost (rather than simply touching it like you do now) and to reveal pathways that are otherwise inaccessible, while playing as the chaser.

After this update, we will begin the long march towards a more content rich game and more 'complete' experience. This means more official levels and the next major piece of work - a level editor. We'll be sharing more along the way in regular devlogs with an aim to hopefully hit a release date of early next year.

Audio - Introducing our third team member

We're also thrilled to announce that [Ben Vibrant](Ben Vibrant. (@BenVibrantt) / XTwitterhttps://twitter.com › BenVibrantt) has joined the team and will be working on audio for the game. We'll be sharing more over the coming weeks so be sure to look out for those updates!

Stay informed

Thanks for playing Neon Shift! If you are interested in following our development, be sure to follow us or join the discord using the info below:

• Follow us here, on itch
• Follow Keywarn on Twitter
• Follow Keywarn on TikTok
• Join our Keydoo Software community Discord server