Day 217* Changed lots of game icons/buttons and UI
* Worked on a new level from one of Steve's designs
* Tweaked how map titles and descriptions are loaded and unlocked
I'd like to release a new build in the next few days. Really I just need to build a few more levels and it should be possible to play through them, beating one level and unlocking the next. It certainly feels more like a game now.
Current problems:
1. Sometimes when there aren't many enemies around it can almost feel like a bit of a chore to move the heroes since there are four of them and you generally want to be close to a door before opening it. I'm thinking that I might have some kind of mechanic that allows you to move your heroes to the same spot, say, right before opening a door. There are problems with balance and stuff then however - my main concern being that it gets your characters out of sticky situations (imagine one hero escaping from traps easily by just teleporting to another hero). To combat this there would need to be some restrictions - perhaps you need line of sight from hero to hero, or perhaps you need a clear path. Alternatively I could have some kind of "leader" system where you can only jump to the leader hero of a party - that could affect gameplay quite a bit however.
2. I haven't put enough thought into the end objectives for each level. Besides killing all of the enemies, some of the other end goals are a bit more complicated to code and I'm not sure how they will look visually either. For example, if there's a level where you're required to pull a lever to beat the level (to agree thematically with some storyline element), it would look strange if the level just finished as soon as you pull the lever, so I'll probably need to implement some kind of pop-up textbox feature to add a bit more context and storyline for events such as that.
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