Lloid Gets to the Root of the Problem

Lead Systems Design

Gameplay Trailer

Lloid gets to the Root of the Problem is a side scrolling platformer where the player controls a sleepy mandrake trying to get to the top of a tree in order to put the noisy forest to sleep so they can get some well earned rest.

Lloid uses his root limbs to interact with his environment, extending his arms out to pull himself forward, creating bramble walls to stun other roots, and finally he can create mushrooms to jump around.

This project won the SCAD Global Game Jam Award for best use of Theme!

Building lloid

From the conception of Lloid as a character, I knew I wanted to make use of his mandrake design. To that end, all his powers are based off of roots and thorns.

Stretchy Arms

Overview

Lloid stretches out his arms, grabbing any branches and using them to pull himself forward. This provides the player's main form of horizontal movement and parkour.

The thought process behind this ability was adding more dynamic movement then just running and jumping, and making the movement feel more risky.

Functionality

The Stretchy Arms work by using a second Blueprint called VinePull. When VinePull is spawned it immediately does the Pull method which extends this object until it finds an object to pull or overlaps an object Lloid can use to launch himself. When the pullable object is overlapped, the launch angle is detirmined and then Lloid is launched in the direction of the vine.

One of the challenges was making this ability feel like a jump and not feel too robotic. To this end, I added minimum jump angles on the launch. If the Z value of the VinePull's forward vector was too low, it set it to a higher value to add some verticality to the pull no matter what angle pulled from. This also made the Stretchy Arm's easier to use as the player wouldn't send themselves crashing downwards and made the parkouring much smoother overall.

BounceShroom

Overview

Lloid stretches his arms to the selected location and creates a BounceShroom at that location. When Lloid lands on the BounceShroom he will be sent flying up into the air.

This power acts as Lloid's upwards mobility, and when combined with the Strechy Arms creates a satisfying gameplay loop full of precise ariel movement.

Functionality

The BounceShroom has two parts to it's code. The first is when the player presses right click a BounceShroom is spawned at that location immediately, and then then the ability goes on cooldown for two seconds. We tried having no cooldown, but it was far too easy to abuse the flexibility of the BounceShroom, and found the cooldown made using BounceShroom recklessly carry some more risk.

The second part of the code is the act of bouncing itself. When Lloid lands on the BounceShroom, it contracts, and then launches Lloid after a very short cooldown.