Kandria
Exploring levels and design
February's almost over and we're only really getting started on implementing the level design for the vertical slice. Oh god oh man, oh god oh man!
Nick
This week was supposed to be all work on level design for me. It ended up being a mix of that, tile work, bugfixing, combat design, and AI work. For one part because I had to help Tim and Fred with their tasks, but mostly because I found I had a massive creative block when it came to making the levels.
Level design is probably the game design part I have the least experience with, and so it's a very daunting task every time. I don't really know where to start, what to look for, or even what my thought process should be for going about it. In any case, after some days of flailing about dealing with other things instead I pushed myself to sit down and do another revision of the first region's layout.
This is a bit more sensible than the previous sketch I made of the area, since here I tried to focus on making the rooms have an actual intended purpose in-universe, and tried to make them connect in a somewhat sensible manner.
After having done the basic layout of them, I feel like I made too few rooms overall, and too many huge ones. I'll have to consider that for future revisions and sections. I find it hard to make the rooms small though, as "in reality" they would probably be even bigger still. Regardless though, I do need to reign in that tendency to make the game actually work well as a, well, game.
I'm also having trouble figuring out how to integrate the platforming challenge aspect of the game into the current design. Platforming mechanics tend to be rather silly and "out there", which conflicts with the grounded and serious tone of the rest of the game. Though not only the mechanics need to be properly contextualised, the level design has to, too. I can't just make strange, twisting passages and blocks that slam around in weird ways, since it would be disjointed from the rest of the world.
So far I haven't been able to come up with a good rationale or design principle to alleviate these problems. Can you think of anything? Are there any games with grounded worlds that still feature platforming extensively? I'd appreciate it a lot if you could let me know about them if you know any!
Anyway, I've managed to put together a couple of screenshots of the various environments:
These do look pretty good to me, so I'm quite happy with how the tilesets are coming together overall. I'm also a bit distraught however, as I'm realising there's a bunch more tiles I need that are missing, and actually piecing together these environments takes a huge amount of time, even if you already know the general layout, and even with all the support tools like auto-tiling that I've implemented to speed up the process.
Anyway, this has been a good learning experience, since I now know I have to drastically adjust my expectations regarding the speed at which these levels can be produced, both in terms of creating the tilesets, and in terms of designing and realising the actual layouts.
I also spent some time going back over the combat system together with Fred. With his feedback I've implemented two small changes that make a massive difference: cooldown after attacks, so that you can't just keep mashing attacks, and buffer expiration. Previously the game would indefinitely buffer your last input and execute it as soon as possible (whenever the next cancelable frame happens). Now it expires this buffer and only keeps it in for a fraction of a second. This avoids scenarios where you mash a button a bunch, and the game would then queue the last action for way longer than you expected.
Both of these changes make the combat system feel a lot more "full". It's still not great though, and it's very hard to figure out what needs tweaking and changing to make it better. My current hope is that we can get some feedback from you and our testers on this, and with those different perspectives have a better chance at figuring out how to tweak it to make it more fun.
As shown in the screenshot above, I've also reinstated the wolf enemy that I was working on over half a year ago. The new AI works a lot better, but it's still kinda clunky. I'll definitely have to go over it again in the future.
Finally, aside from bug fixes and other improvements, I've started work on documenting the dialogue system we use in Kandria. I'll publish that in the coming week and will also make sure to talk about it in the next monthly update due next week. Since it's written in Lisp I don't think it'll find much use in other projects, but I hope that publishing the system will at least make it find its way to other people and inspire them to build similar systems in their games.
Tim
The logic and draft dialogue for the second quest is now done, which has been useful to learn more about conditionals and branching (and poke Nick about as always :p). And I now know how to create items, add them to the inventory, and query them later! Might not sound like much, but this will be super powerful. I also spoke with Nick about the region layout, as we want to make sure the faction locations fit well with the lore.
Fred
I worked on revising the combat this week. Went over the interactions with the zombies and tweaked some of the animations to be more fluid.
Conclusion
Ah god, it's the end of the month again already. Only one more month left in the initial schedule, and I feel like it's not enough time by far! Oh dear. Well, I suppose we'll see in a week or two whether we cut it short or extend the deadline. For now, back to work!