TOE week 51: Highlighting Short Comings

Last week things got a little off topic and instead I talked a bit about work ethic. I didn’t even talk about the fact that I built about half of a level. This week I finished the other half of it. This new level is by no means done. In fact if anything it has highlighted some of the short comings of my game currently. You can’t really know what is and isn’t working until you try to put it all together as a cohesive whole. In my test level I could tell if thing were functioning and for the most part they were. But was the functionality that I made in the test level working in terms of actually being fun to play? The answer I got was yes and no. Certain things work really well and other things do not. 

For example my using the portal as a barrier against enemy energy attacks is really rather cool. This also makes my stationary beam attack enemies and spot light enemies more cool. Also in the cool column are the fire push colliders. Using the portal to block a vector in the future or utilize a vector in that past is default cool. Having the Player teleport to the past to get a checkpoint reminds me of opening a shortcut to a bonfire in Dark Souls. However the spotlight enemy that I made need to track the Player once spotted until the Player is out of sight for a certain amount of time. My little rushling enemies are not fun to fight on slopes. The flying nuisance enemies don’t seem to even have a place in this level. 

The level right now is currently just populated by some enemies, push colliders, checkpoints and the rest is level geometry. Currently it is in white box mode. Nothing pretty, mostly function. So the next step is making the stuff above that is not working to its full potential, function better. 

I did also address some minor problems this week like the Player’s attack animation could not transition to the duck animation. Meaning that the Player would stick on the last frame of the attack animation if you attacked and then pressed down on the controller this made fighting the stationary beam enemies not fun because your control would break mid fight causing you to take a hit. I found this out while putting them in this level. Fixed this and it became more fun. I just have to keep doing stuff like that to make the level better. Stuff to do next week. 

This is how it looks right now.