Week 2: Wanted to really hammer out the core mechanics of the game this week, and made really big strides. I was struggling with the animation curve for the tongue grapple, but got it worked out. I then tweaked the player's gravity and pull force for the grapple to get it to a comfortable spot that does not feel too jerky or overly floaty. 

Then I started working on the jump mechanic. I don't want the player character to be able to walk or jump straight up, so what I really wanted to achieve was a diagonal jump that is longer the longer you hold the jump input. This proved substantially more difficult then I had expected since any jump I had programmed in the past was based mostly off the player controller's directional movement. The jump mechanic ended up impacting the grapple mechanics physics pretty heavily so I had to do loads of trouble shooting to find a jump solution that did not break the first mechanic. About 13 tutorials and 10 or so hours later I had mashed enough different programming concepts together into a passable directional jump with the “charge jump” implementation.

I figured with both mechanics very close to feature complete, I wanted to get a start on art assets and animations for the player character. I drew a little frog and converted it into a transparent PNG. I replaced the placeholder square with the frog in engine and realized that my grappling hook pivot point is incredibly finicky and I was really struggling with anchoring it to the mouth of the sprite when the sprite renders invert on the X axis to jump in the opposite direction. I played around with it for a few hours to very little success and have come to the conclusion that I may have to change the overall look of my frog to be more rounded so that the tongue can always launch from a center point whether facing left or right. This is not something I want to do, and intend to give it another 5-8 hour’s to try and find a solution, but due to the compressed nature of this dev cycle, I may have to cut my losses and look for another sprite solution