A Small Addition: Making Yourself Smaller

In the new year's update I mentioned that I've added a bunch of features and changes to Ronn For Your Life that I initially never planned to include. All of these will be covered separately here on the blog throughout the year. This is the first of many to come, and we're starting small... Quite literally! It's a small addition that makes you smaller (or at least shorter); crouching!

Just like a crouching player character, this blog will be on the short side, since there's not much to cover. But basically, I've added the ability for the player to crouch, which actually opens a few doors for a variety of things. It allows me a little more creativity and flexibility in terms of level design; For example I can now add obstacles that the player needs to crouch below in order to access.

But crouching is not just crouching - it's also considered sneaking, which ties nicely into the stealth system that I also added (which will be covered in a dedicated and much longer blog post). When you're crouching / sneaking, you will move considerably slower, but you will be harder to spot and you will make less noise. You will also be harder to hit, since your hitbox is more than halved in height - which in turn also lets you sort of crawl underneath things.

Finally, another by product of this is that the "down" key is now a general control key in the game on the same level as left, right, up, attack etc., which it wasn't before - and it is used for more than just crouching... But more on that later.

Disclaimer: 
As always, all graphics presented here on the blog (until otherwise officially stated) are 100% placeholder and for demonstration purposes only. I always find this point important to stress, but particularly so in this case, since the crouching does look really unintentionally hilarious.

But with that disclaimer out of the way, here is a crouching Ronn:

This is the smallest (get it? harh harh... okay, I'll stop now) of the "unplanned additions", but it fits nicely as the first in the series of updates covering them, as things will only get bigger from now on. So stay tuned for more coverage on the unplanned features!