Re-Bot

Movement Recording & Playback

The core mechanic of the game is recording one second of the player's movement and replaying it in a loop. This was the first thing I prototyped.

I created a script with methods for the specific actions of the player movement, including horizontal movement and jumping, and used these methods for both the player's controls during the one second of recording and the movement playback. The data on the player's actions, specifically the keys they press and when they press them, was stored in a List.

After creating the first prototype of this mechanic, I noticed that sometimes the first action in the loop is only played during the first iteration of playback, and never again afterward. To approach this problem, I tested the mechanic several times with various different movements to try to find a pattern between the instances when the bug occurred. I realized that this happened if I moved both left and right but didn't release the key during the recording stage, and I was able to solve the issue by stopping the player's horizontal movement at the end of a loop during playback.

Dragging Objects

The second mechanic in our game is dragging objects into the level, with the object snapping to the tilemap grid, not colliding with the player until it has been placed, and only being able to be placed in certain tiles (for example, you cannot place an object in a wall). Additionally, an object cannot be dragged before the recording stage ends or after it has been placed.

This game was my first time using tilemaps, so this mechanic was my greatest concern in the development, especially with the placement constraints of the draggable objects.

I looked up tutorials and documentation about tilemap manipulation and movement, and was able to apply the knowledge I learned for my purposes. I converted the object's position to and from the type used for tile positions, and used a separate unrendered tilemap to determine the valid placement positions of the object.