Devlog 2: Interaction

The main focus for this week's development centered around bringing the player to life with animations and environmental interactions! While there's not a ton of pretty things to show this week, this stage laid the foundations of believable movement and interactable puzzle mechanics, which were two sore-spots I was worried would be out of scope. 

Player Animations: Making Movement Feel Real

The player now transitions fluidly between idle, walking, jumping, and landing states. Each animation is controlled through a combination of booleans and triggers, connected via a structured Animator state machine.

• Jumping triggers when the player leaves the ground (checked using a GroundCheck transform and Physics2D.OverlapCircle).

• Landing triggers automatically when the player becomes grounded again. This animation takes priority over movement inputs to allow for a full impact visual before resuming control.

• Walking and idle states are toggled based on horizontal input, ensuring the player’s movement always reflects their animation state.

This system avoids any wasted transitions or animation awkwardness by carefully checking the current state of the player and only using logical animations switches. Combined with these new animations, the variable jump height and sprite flipping now make this player character feel more expressive and responsive without any unnecessary complexity!

Lever & Platform Interactions

To start building out environmental interaction, I made a simple lever interaction that currently controls moving platforms, but can interact with anything, as it activates through an array of objects set in the inspector.

• Levers can be triggered by the player via a simple interaction system (e.g., a key press [e] when within range), setting off events like platform movement or conveyor belts.

• Platforms respond to lever input by translating along predefined paths or toggling between positions.

• Each interaction is modular; levers can be assigned different behaviors or targets, which means they can be reused across levels without re-coding logic from scratch.

The challenge was syncing platform movement and animation feedback to keep everything visually coherent. I made sure lever animations and platform movement triggers lined up cleanly, avoiding issues where things would activate before the player had any visual confirmation.