Sunday, June 25, 2017

Loads more feedback, tweaks, and new levels


So I tried to make up for not posting last week by doing a whole bunch this week. I worked on new levels at the beginning of the week, but then on Saturday took the game to a playtest and got a lot of great feedback, which prompted me to make the following tweaks:

Remember way back when I decided to make the player rotate instantaneously upon charging? It felt like such a good idea at the time... too bad it allows players to quickly click their way through a lot of obstacles. Three-hit goal in your way? Just click it three times and you'll clear it no problem, no need to interact with warp walls. I decided to leave things that way and see if it really ruined things and, yeah, it does seem to mess things up. You can also simply run left-right-left over goals and clear them that way. To fix that, I set the default timer for these goals to be shorter. Now you should be able to clear them a bit harder. Pro tip though: If you spin your mouse around the player while holding down mouse click, you become a whirling dervish, registering hit collisions many times a second, and mowing down all goals in your path! Sigh... Maybe I should just make goals impossible to move through unless you're charging? Could be interesting.

I made a few new levels:


The above level preps the player for this one, which is an old one:


I'm trying to get better at transitions between levels. I find the key is to have the player seeing and doing things in the earlier level which resemble things they will see and do in the next level (which is really obvious in retrospect). That's why I transition out of the section on quick, small charges by using this level:


To go into this level (again, an old one):


It's not exactly the same, but in both you start and stop in similar places, having hit several linked notes along the way. One level is square, while the other is triangular.

I also added the following levels:





And I made tweaks to the following:

 (Arms shortened, timer increased)

 (Median solidified)

(Kill walls removed)

I know this game must have potential... I'm still thinking of ways to combine the features I have into surprising new levels. For now though, I think I've posted enough.

Charging-up noise is, as always, by Javier Zumer and I use and modify it using this license.

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