Moving Forward

This week was a completely different experience than last week. This week, rather than focusing on conceptualization I've moved on to prototyping. This includes both levels and secondary mechanics. At the beginning of the week the level team picked five of our favorite mechanics from last week and got to work prototyping them. I did two of these mechanics, spikes and destructible walls. We made a branch of Ryan's new framework to do it in so that we could start understanding it and not have to make too many changes when the framework is done and everything gets merged. In addition to creating those two secondary mechanics I also worked on a few level prototypes. This week these were simple and were mainly meant to get me some experience adding objects to the level editor and to test my new systems. I also experimented a little bit with the basic platforming in the game to see what kinds of challenges were possible. The issue which held me back from really getting going with level prototyping was that the tiles the level building tool was using were huge and didn't give me much control over the level. This issue has already been fixed and I'm looking forward to being able to create some awesome levels.

This upcoming week we're going to have our first critique and I'm both excited and nervous about it. I'm not completely sure just how ready the game will be for it but I think it will be useful nonetheless. I hope to have my prototype levels looked at and played so that I will have a better idea of what is fun and what is not moving forward. I'm sure some of the feedback won't be surprising but the more feedback I get on the subject the sooner I'll able to understand how to create awesome levels for the game.