Game Dev Blog #4: Clinging on for life

Three Achievements:

1. Cling and climb mechanic: To overcome an issue with the current level generation I prototyped a mechanic to hang from ledges and pull yourself up.
2. Jump boost: Having played a bit more it makes sense that when you are walking/running (there’s no run or walk toggle yet) and you jump, you’ll jump that little bit higher than you do if it’s just a standing jump. So in order to reach higher ledges you need to run and jump.
3. BETTER Distribution: I now have a script that turns my love2D project into a zipped file containing everything it needs to share with others. First it zips the folder, then renames the zip extension to .love, appends that to the love.exe to create an executable, and puts all the other necessary Love2D library files into the folder, then creates a zip of that. All this is done in a build folder with each zip/folder given an automated version number, so can always go back and test earlier builds to see if I introduced a bug somewhere.

Two Things I Learned:

1. I’m loving game development. It’s far more fun to test than ordinary website coding. I wish I’d done this much sooner. 🙂
2. Prototyping requires discipline. Once I added fall damage and a health bar I was immediately thinking about the bar wiggling, the fill bar shrinking as I take damage rather than just taking a chunk of health away, the window border flashing red, etc. But all this can come later when I’m adding the “juice” – it probably doesn’t even need to be in the scope of the initial game submission.

One Thing Coming Up:

1. Now that I’ve implemented the ledge mechanics, I think it’d be fun to be able to push off from the ledge and jump backwards to reach other ledges, so that’s the next thing I want to prototype.