This week I fixed some issues caused by the change I made last week. This means that the speed dampening I'm doing now works when you have the mouse button held down, and the speed dampening doesn't screw up your charge if you charge while standing still.
I also realized that there's been an issue for forever with charging while moving. Because I don't stop the player's movement just before a charge, you actually move a bit to the side in between the time when you let go of the charge button and the time when you actually charge.
Additionally, several failure menus were totally disconnected and did nothing when you hit the buttons for retrying the level or returning to the menu... Those are now fixed.
I created a new level, which looks like this:
I needed a triangular level which forced players to do something uncomfortable: to start charges which aren't fully charged. (Man, I'm really being punished for giving players a charge attack that you have to charge up). You can't solve this puzzle by making full charges. At least some of them need to be quick charges that are just aimed in the right direction. It's an important skill to have in the game, and I notice that literally no players ever feel comfortable doing this. Partly, this is due to the penalization of being stunned upon hitting a wall. Something I hope to communicate with this level is that that penalty scales with how long you hold the charge for. Another reason why it felt uncomfortable is because of how slidey the controls felt, which have obviously changed. One thing I'm thinking of doing in the future is making it take more time to charge up your charge (there it is again) so that it becomes more apparent that you can release the meter prematurely.
I deleted an old level, specifically this one:
I've seen people really like this level and I've seen people really dislike this level. I've never felt strongly about it and I'm not sure that whatever concept I was going for was being communicated very clearly. It'll come back in some form, I know.
I also changed a level from this:
to this:
The kill walls were... overkill for a level this early into the game (by level, this is about a third of the way into the game, but by time it's probably more like a fourth) so I removed them. Then I just had to reposition the center obstacles. This level is another reason why I created the triangular level above. This level requires a quick charge through a blue wall to get one node followed by another charge (or just moving quickly) to get to the second node. Players have no idea that they can do quick charges, so this was frustrating too.
As always the charging-up sound is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify this sound under this license.
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