Dev Diary 18 Oct

19 OCT 2020

Some of the playtesting also showed that the game rewards players for creeping incredibly slowly and shooting enemies just barely out of range. That’s not good. Sizes and ranges have been adjusted for both the player and the enemies so that both can shoot from the same distance: just barely on screen. Any shorter and the player would feel cheated that their bullets don’t reach something they can see given that the bullets are invisible. 

20 OCT 2020

Work began, and mostly finished, on level 3. It was a long debate if I wanted to have 1 extra crew to rescue per room, not wanting it to feel like an arcade game where the difficulty is literally just being incremented by 1 each room. After a bit of deliberation, I decided it makes sense because I need to build a whole room for each objective and given that there is nothing to do in the levels but rescues, I’d better just have an extra room to add to the difficulty. With the harder two levels complete, 1 and 2 should be exceedingly quicker. 

I also lowered tall enemy health and made rescuing crew members fully heal the player. The idea isn’t to torture the player with repetitive clicking and dying. This game is just meant to be a small taste of what it’s like to complete a game. If I find that the game is too easy I may lower how much the crew heals the player, but I definitely don’t want to change the health of tall enemies.

The trouble with level designing for a game where the player is two units tall but can only jump one unit high is that the paths have to be VERY linear. I’m trying hard to make them more interesting but you can’t pass anything, you can’t jump up almost anything, you can’t go through anything.. All you can do is baaarely jump up one square. Otherwise everything becomes moving platforms. It’s really stretching my imagination to make 2 enemies and the ability to crouch interesting for 4 levels. I wanted to finally finish this without kidding myself by saying “well what if I just add this? .. and maybe this?.. And three more things!” and instead just finally finish it. But honestly? I think it’s working.

22 OCT 2020

The player’s animations were finally completed so they were able to be completely implemented into the game. With the motivation to have my art assets finally completed I set out to make the shorter enemies. The quality may not be the same as when I had an artist, but I think they fit the theme fairly well. I’m having a little bit of trouble implementing my old code but I think it should be a relatively quick fix. I also got the tutorial level, Level 1, completed. It introduces all the core concepts quickly enough without feeling too handholding. . . much. 

I also realized I think I might need achievements for it to be on steam? Not sure. I’ll have to look into it.