Game Dev Blog #3: Prototyping continued

Last night I was going to focus on re-working the level generation protoyping and come up with a more complex system, but ended up doing some other things instead.

Three Achievements:

1. Added fall damage and a health bar: In order to make the playtest worth playing I’ve added some jeopardy in the form of fall damage. You can now actually die.
2. Added a win condition: The main aim of a level will usually be to find the exit, so I’ve put some tiles in to represent the exit, and thus, win the game. Of course, in the final game it won’t be so easy to reach.
3. Distribution: Tested how to package the game into a zip file that playtesters can download, extract and run. I want to make that process a bit smoother, but it’s not far off. The smoother a process is, the more likely it will be used. Meaning more regular updates for play testers to try.

Two Things I Learned:

1. Level generation, the way I want it, is hard. I wanted natural looking tunnelling, with chambers and bends and junctions. Given the time contraints I may keep my initial version super simple, but I will continue to research different algorithms like perlin noise, drunkard walk and cellular automaton, and perhaps come up with a bunch of rules, to create the complex but playable levels that I’m looking for.
2. Early play testing can inspire new ideas. I think I’m going to prototype a climb/cling mechanic around ledges. Whether it remains in the final version will depend on what the level generation eventually looks like, but in the current prototype, grabbing onto ledges is pretty essential (unless I remove all the rock tiles from the bottom of the cave, but that would be boring)

One Thing Coming Up:

1. A little video to demonstrate some of the functionality so far, but I think I’ll save that till I prototype the climb/cling mechanic.