I've continued to work on my platform game with some results that I'm pretty happy about. I've been able to eliminate the main issues that I figure would be things people just naturally expected to work right. Little things like the sprite floating above the ground in some cases when you land from a jump or the scrolling not following the character properly or falling in through middle of a tile. I don't think I have ever had any game that I've done work this well. I had a design issue which I discussed in the game design forum and even though the solution I went with wasn't specifically suggested thinking about the reposnses got me on the right track. It's cool how sometimes by just stating a problem to someone else the solution can come to you sometimes. I also added in an egg to the game which can be kicked around like a ball. Eventually I'll have a few of these eggs hidden in the maze to retreive to some location as the main goal of the game.
But for now there's still no actual end game condition yet. I need to add a few more things before I can have an official end. Even then, I find myself almost leaning towards an entirely "achievement" based game. I'm suprised at this because I generally don't find earning achievement badges a very engaging game element. It frequently seems to be something that's tacked on because people are expecting to see that sort of thing these days. But as I've been testing things out I found myself thinking of a couple feats that I wanted to try to accomplish partly for testing purposes and partly because it seemed like something worth trying to do. So I see no reason not to include something to recognise a player's completion of the same tasks.
But then I think about what I plan to have as my main goal (egg retrieving) and I'm not sure if it's a large enough accomplishment compared to the other achievements for it to be an appropriate end game condition. A game that has a bunch of achievement tasks to complete might be fun and all but do they all come together to make the game feel like a cohesive whole? It could just be that I've been watching too many competition shows on Food Network and the things that the judges say about food aren't relavent to creating a game. But I do want this thing to come together well in the end and I'm not sure I'm headed in the right direction.
Anyways, I've updated my website with the latest build here.
Some general instructions can be found here.
And development notes are here.
Any feedback on the game so far would be appreciated.
I don't know if anyone has any interest in reading the development notes but I write them anyways as part of the process I go through when working on stuff so it's nothing for me to make them available. It's basically the thought process I've gone through when working on something in case I ever wonder what the hell was I thinking down the road. I like to think it shows how I've gone from one step of development to the next but it could just be exposing my ignorance and bad practices to the world.
