… Sorry about that.

I put Captain Stretchy-Arms on hold for two weeks while real-life things were messing with my schedule. Those two weeks turned out to be incredibly unproductive. Certainly the lack of time – especially in nice, long, uninterrupted blocks – did not help. But I continue to be astounded by the motivation and productivity difference between working on something “solid” (like a game) and something nebulous (like some utility code).

So today I picked up where I left off – including the time, making this officially Day 4 of development.

Today I added the player character – Captain Stretchy-Arms himself. I gave him two of the arms I had prepared earlier, and spent the rest of the day tweaking the arm behaviour for the swinging Captain.

The control scheme in this prototype has changed slightly. Manual movement is now assigned to the middle mouse button, to free up the left and right buttons. My original design calls for the left and right mouse buttons (and eventually the two triggers on an Xbox 360 controller) to control the left and right arms.

In practice, this design feels really awful. As it turns out, the concept of a “left arm” and a “right arm” does not make sense here – an arm can start on the left of the player-character, and end up to the character’s right as he swings, or an arm can be shot to the left in the first place using the right mouse button – and vice versa.

Not to mention, it requires a lot of dexterity to coordinate both mouse buttons at once, while moving the mouse around.

So that you can all experience just how bad this feels, I have left this input system in today’s download (remember to read the included readme file for the system requirements). Below is a screenshot of Captain Stretchy-Arms swinging around.

Tomorrow I plan to change the input scheme so that it uses a single button for shooting the arms – and put the hold and retract actions on timers as necessary.