Improving grabbing and throwing game mechanic

Hi there!

Today I want to talk about the grabbing and throwing mechanic. The game has a lot of objects you can interact with. Many of them are grabbable, meaning that you can grab, move them around and throw them. This is a crucial mechanic in the game to solve puzzles, find collectibles and make your way to the goal. However, the current implementation for the throwing part was not well designed for aiming. The throwing force was tight to the movement speed of the player which gives a very narrow range of possible throwing distances. I have changed the implementation to a press/release duration. The longer you press, the greater the force. After some testing and tweaking, it felt that 0.5 seconds as the pressing time for maximum force was a good value. You can quickly reach the maximum force, but still it is easy to control the force. The other issue of the throwing is the direction. Currently, the throwing direction is basically the current facing direction of the player, which is the logical choice. Nevertheless, I am not super happy on how it feels, since the player facing mechanic is tight to the movement and therefore it does not turn immediately. For the player movement, that feels great, however, it makes the aiming  sometimes a bit tedious. 

Do you have any idea on how to improve this mechanic? 

One idea I have in mind is to allow the player to change the facing direction with input. I have been testing this idea and when playing with the gamepad it feels great. You can use one of the joysticks for movement and the other for facing. This could be an option... what do you think?

Here you can see a short video showing how the current implementation works and looks like. 

Today it is a short update! I have been very busy implementing the binary assets package for the production build. But I am happy to share that it is almost finished. Only a couple more fixes and will be ready. After that it is only setting up properly the logger and should have a build to share with you all!

I hope you like the content and please comment below. I really appreciate :)

Thanks!