Week Nine / Day Two

Not a whole lot to update today. My stepdad played my game yesterday, starting at the beginning of the tutorials and through the first couple levels, as a complete neophyte in order to judge the game's accessibility. Overall he really likes it, he just thought some things were a little unclear and that the levels I had were a bit too hard. He also said that the game seemed to play too fast. This seems reasonable, considering I've been building levels for myself, and I've had hours of practice at the timing of swinging the ship around planets and such. Therefore, I had to figure out a way to make the game a bit easier.

After some more tuning today I realized that if you proportionally change the masses of the ship and the planets, the motions and radii of orbits stay the same, but the ship slows down, therefore making my levels still playable while being able to adjust the speed. Now when the game loads, it loads the levels in but doubles the list, creating a harder version of each level that increases the masses. Not only does this solve my problem of the game being too hard, I now get two levels out of every one I make. Technically I only need 10 levels for release now, because from those I'll have 20. Score.

I added another play element, as well as figured out a new launcher structure that can be built out of planets. Observe the screenshot below:



First is the black planet in the middle of the green planets, or a 'brake'. If the ship is currently colored it will pass through the brake as it weren't there. However, if the ship is neutral is will reach the brake and come to a halt. This comes in handy in a number of cases, particularly in the example above. The array of green planets, or collectively a 'spinner' as I'm calling them, are all rotating around the brake at the same speed, which basically just moves the gap along (think the circles of ghosts in the ghost houses in Super Mario World that you had to jump through). Once inside the spinner, and stopped thanks to the brake, the player can than wait for the spinner to align the gap towards the goal, and switch the the color opposite the spinner, in this case yellow, and the repulsive force of the spinners planets will squeeze the ship out through the hole. I imagine levels built up with a few of these, where the player may need to shoot between multiple spinners to reach the goal.

Overall today went well, and each day I learn more about the quirks of my engine and the neat things I can do with it. I can introduce these concepts to the player in simple form early on and progressively build them up to more advanced levels. Seems I lied, there was a decent amount to write about today. Let's see what tomorrow holds; happy coding.

One last note, depending on the success of Chromovis and my life over the next couple months, there is a good chance a 2.0 could be released before the end of next summer. A lot of the tools I want to build come from things I learned I did wrong with Chromovis, so it should be fairly obvious that they would be tailored quite well to a rewrite of the game. While the game plays well in its current form, there is so much I'd do different in hindsight, and I'd still really like a level builder. If the level builder was built as a debug version of the game engine from the beginning it would simplify the entire process and be much cleaner. Also, level loading and storing, as well as the high score system all could use a rewrite, and I'd love network integration. All in due time I suppose.