Week Nine / Day Four

Had to babysit earlier today, as well as make a grocery run, so while I didn't get a full day in I still made some decent progress. I'm going to come right out and say it, building levels the way I have to build levels does sort of suck. It's slow, tedious, and doesn't really inspire creativity, as instead of being able to just throw planets around and try stuff it's the level designers equivalent of data entry. However, this is the path I've chosen and I am sticking to it.

I got three levels done today, all of which fit into the tutorial section. I don't think I'm going to actually call the tutorials, tutorials. I'd rather them just be easy levels which are meant to teach. That way I can incrementally increase the difficulty of the levels dispersed amongst them. Otherwise, I would end up laying a ton of information on the player all at once and then expect them to start playing knowing everything; rather, I'll introduce a concept and give the player a few opportunities to play around with what they've learned. Here are two of the levels:




There first requires the player to switch back and forth between the planets, moving up the middle to reach the goal. The second requires them to approach the red, stop, move towards green and then down towards blue without hitting the dead planets.

I added a crash animation, or rather I made it so the ship shrinks when you crash into a planet. It's quite simple, but works. The visual cue complementing the audio explosion seems to fit.



Another neat thing I added today was a 'skin' over the ship that rotates based on the velocity of the ship. There is a cutaway on the skin so that you see the old ship texture beneath it, which gives the ship a twirly top look as its moving around. I don't like static things, and this was a simple solution to give my ship some life:




I made a few adjustments to some other levels, either to make the hints clearer or to try and get them to play a bit smoother or more intuitively. I also did some necessary cleanup of the application bundle. I had lots of old textures still being packaged with everything and mixed around in folders, multiple copies hanging, etc. It makes it easier for me to work when I'm at peace with the organization. The code is a spaghetti mess, but I'd say for my first game it isn't all that bad.

That about rounds up today. I'm not exactly getting as far as I wanted to this week, but things are getting chipped off the list. If tomorrow can be a banging day that should give me a good vibe for starting next week. Also, mixing code changes and updates with level building helps keep things interesting. On that note, Good Night, and Good Luck.