Maths
My work was canceled this afternoon so that people could go outside and enjoy the first really nice day in Seattle this year, but I only got as far as the lobby. I made an iced soy latte and got to work on improving the main character’s movement in Paraplu. The protagonist (or “Shipâ€, as it’s still called in the code because of Soft Landing) had a pretty naïve way of moving, such that you can run diagonally √2 times as fast as you can run orthogonally. Also, all of the inertia code from SL was ripped out for the time being.
I set about improving the movement algorithms to yield consistent speeds in all directions, and incorporating an inertia system. I tried several complicated methods which failed in colorful ways, before settling on a cleanly simplified but almost precisely correct method. Now, it takes a moment to get up to speed, change direction, or stop, and it takes twice as long to turn around.