Week 3: Level design & negative player effects (90% Complete)

Leading on from last weeks post in regards to the changing of the time table, I'll be sticking to the current plan up until project week 6 (the menu system).

This weeks task again demanded more than I expect it, but this time, it was a manageable demand. I looked at the level I had and one thing was clear, it was too big! This would cause the game play to be too spread out and the opposite of what I wanted, fast paced & action packed. Resizing the level was relatively painless since most of systems that depended on the levels size (e.g where the AI patrols) wasn't hard-coded, so all I had to do was change the values.

With that done I could then lay out the tiles (platforms) that players will be jumping on and fighting over. I mentioned in the brief that the general idea of the game level is that the player will always want to be as close to the source as possible (they will gain the most charge over time and be able to score more quickly). So, that meant that the tiles had to be spread out so that the higher up the player was, the more difficult it needed to be for the player to move around. The only issue I had was with the player not being able to jump high enough, so I had to modify the physics properties somewhat.

Lastly was the task of creating the levels textures. I wrestled with what to do with the look of the level for a long time. On one hand I wanted it too look very sleek and metallic/cold, on the other, I wanted something that was very simple and almost child like.

I began creating the more 'realistic' looking textures, however they didn't fit in at all, and in fact, the place-holder art looked better!

When I went back to my original ideas on how the game should look like I found that my early ideas suited it much better. I set off wanting creating a very simplified almost Lego/childlike look to my game. Also, after having played many 'indie' games over the course of the week, I found that the simplest looking ones were always more fun & easy to play.

While the the look of the level may be revised during the scheduled sprite creation week, this level layout looks energetic and colourful as well as being practical for the purposes of game-play.

As for player feedback, I added in a rumble effect on the game-pad when a player is under the effect of a static charge stun. What I noticed when adding in the physical force knock back of being attacked by another player was that the PVP system has a major bug in it. The problem is that within the code that determines who the player can hit and if they have been hit, there is a bug that makes one or more players hit more than one target (even if those targets are out of range).

Therefore I have deducted 10 percent from this weeks milestones completion so that I can revisit it in a bug fixing week. While this is a pretty big problem, luckily, I know all the details of it thanks to adding the knock-back effect which should help me solve it rapidly.