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[diegzumillo]

I have been procrastinating on this a lot lately. I think it has to do with not wanting to make levels. I just sat down and made a simple level, appropriate for very early on. Just to get me into the flow, you know? Didn't quite work.

One of the things that is making it difficult is that I'm still making things up as I go, story-wise. Makes it hard to commit to anything, because I might change my mind about something that will make what I'm working right now pointless. I'm familiar with this line of thinking as I have it often, and I know it's a problem that needs to be dealt with. The ADD mind wanders off too easily. Anything slightly uncertain devolves into a crisis where I try to over-analyze all possibilities completely overwhelming me. Then procrastination hits hard.

The way to deal with this, I learned, is to break the problem into smaller chunks. They still require a minimum level of commitment but that is unavoidable. I can't make levels because I have no story, and story dictate the levels. However, a skeleton of a level might be easily adapted to any kind of setting later. So I can make skeleton of levels right now.

With that in mind I made a solid decision! a commitment. I will make a demo with no story at all. This is the project now: a collection of levels with zero context. Just pouring down ideas I have for levels, regardless of where in the game they would end up. Ten levels ought to do it. This will replace the pretty but outdated demo I have uploaded in Gamejolt.

In reality what I would really like to have is a partner to develop games with. When one is burned out development doesn't stop completely. But in any creative endeavor authorship is extremely important and usually neglected in game dev, which makes it hard to team up as independent devs. Who'd work for free on someone else's vision? Oh well. Pointless rambling.

[diegzumillo]

Sorry, I forgot the gif required by law on every devlog post.

[JobLeonard]

It's funny how all game developers are different here. Meanwhile, over in the This Game Is Trash devlog, anotherDev posted a message describing how his problem is that he likes crafting the story but not so much the gameplay mechanics, which is kind of the opposite of your problem 

Maybe you should exchange notes

[diegzumillo]

It's funny how all game developers are different here. Meanwhile, over in the This Game Is Trash devlog, anotherDev posted a message describing how his problem is that he likes crafting the story but not so much the gameplay mechanics, which is kind of the opposite of your problem 

Maybe you should exchange notes

haha that's true. While I consider myself a creative, I always found the hypothetical blank page overwhelming. How do you reduce the infinite possibilities in a way that doesn't feel like you're removing something good?

[JobLeonard]

That's systems thinking backfiring right there. One trick is to not start with a blank page but with the seed of an idea to build on. A narrative idea in this case

[oahda]

Nice GIF! Again, I think it might be worth having something like that even in the first level just to have a non-intrusive way of demonstrating that the game is going to have stuff like that. It's a great hook!

I have similar troubles to the ones you're describing… I try to just sit down and write until something comes along and makes everything magically work together and then I rinse and repeat~ IMO mechanics and story should complement each other anyway, so starting out with a purely mechanical demo seems like a good way to figure out what you can write your story around. c: Looking forward to playing!

[diegzumillo]

Nice GIF! Again, I think it might be worth having something like that even in the first level just to have a non-intrusive way of demonstrating that the game is going to have stuff like that. It's a great hook!

I agree. That first level now has a giant loop placed in such a way that it feels like a trap. You try to jump over and fall in it. Then after going around it you leave from where you came and everything is upside down.

I have similar troubles to the ones you're describing… I try to just sit down and write until something comes along and makes everything magically work together and then I rinse and repeat~ IMO mechanics and story should complement each other anyway, so starting out with a purely mechanical demo seems like a good way to figure out what you can write your story around. c: Looking forward to playing!

That's systems thinking backfiring right there. One trick is to not start with a blank page but with the seed of an idea to build on. A narrative idea in this case

I know, you are both right. It's not even a blank canvas anymore. I have an outline for a while now.

And while making that first level I defined more than just the outline, the plot now has more meaning. You are collecting apples, after the hole the asshole cat appears and starts taking the apples, so you run after asshole cat, then the aliens appear, then I realized way too much stuff is happening at the same time... then I had the most important realization ever. I am the apple. The story I'm writing... is the story of this game's development. They start projects (the giant apple pie, helping the aliens, helping the three witches...) and jump to the next one before finishing it. It came full circle! My lack of focus to come up with a plot became the plot. The challenge is to make obvious that this is the intention, not just bad writing lol

So the thing that locks me mentally is like this: "ok, so I will end the first level going through the first wormhole created by the aliens. But wait, wasn't the new game idea meant so that I could go backtrack to this level? right, I remember now, I didn't decide on that yet. So what do I do right now exactly? I DON'T KNOW" Which is stupid. The answer is right on my face: I do the simpler version, which does not let the player backtrack. At least not intentionally. I can have a fake backtracking with future levels being previous levels where you start at different orientation/scale. I mean, it would be amazing to have a giant single level for the whole game but 1) ain't no one got time for that, 2) I'm pretty sure my computer would explode if I tried it, and 3) it's much more complex and therefore against my current motto of done is better than perfect or even good.

[diegzumillo]

Tried remaking one of the more complex levels of the old demo. It was surprisingly painless. Not quick or easy but all right.

I think the jump needs to be adjusted a little. As it is, moving vertically is awful! and I intend on having lots of jumping up tunnels. In the gif above I got impatient and just cheated my way up with infinite double jumps. The Bloorf as spring isn't working yet too, but it's there. It was a little tricky to implement this level because originally I had spikes, now I have to carefully measure everything to keep the player from going where he isn't supposed to. But it works! No spikes needed, no respawning needed. I think that's a win. Often we have death systems in games just because of reasons, without thinking too much, and it doesn't always add to the design.

One way of making it easier to go up would be to implement one-way platforms.That's easy to do on traditional platforms. If player.y > thisplatform.y then I am a platform, else I am not a platform. Here I don't know how to do it.

For comparison, the original is at 1:24:

[oahda]

Ahhh, it looks so good now! And yeah, lives seem to be a hangover from arcade games that needed a way to get the player to quit eventually that don't actually fit into a lot of games. Would be cool if you could figure out one-way platforms! Maybe just dot product between player direction and platform's up vector or something?

[diegzumillo]

Something like that, yes. But that requires implementing a special type of collider into the physics engine, which I'd rather avoid if possible. But I'll give it a shot.

[Gagz9k]

I just spend a solid 20 minutes just watching the GIF. It's sooo visually pleasing. If you can find a wholesome / heart-warming story to pair with this gameplay I'm sure it gonna be a blast for so many platform fans.

Congratz on this man!

[diegzumillo]

I just spend a solid 20 minutes just watching the GIF. It's sooo visually pleasing. If you can find a wholesome / heart-warming story to pair with this gameplay I'm sure it gonna be a blast for so many platform fans.

Congratz on this man!

Thank you for the kind words, Gagz! 

[JobLeonard]

Just want to join in the praise, it's all coming together really nicely!

Your description of the story concept sounds promising! Like the narrative becoming a patchwork of unfinished threads that still feel cohesive as a whole, as long as you don't pull to hard on any individual loose one

[diegzumillo]

Thank you! It is very encouraging to hear it.

[nova++]

The idea of the storyline being sort of deliberately incoherent and patch feels totally appropriate for the nature of the game. After all, it's spacetime that's been mangled. So not only is space warping the apple around, so too is time being warped and jumbled leading to a story that might be a bit... weird.

10,000,000 bonus points if you make a storyline with a clear A to B progression, then deliberately chop it up and make it non-linear, though.

[diegzumillo]

Hah! Pulling this off would be incredible. I won't be able to inaugurate the "story-poor" tag on steam, which I was looking forward to.

[oahda]

There are definitely stories like that out there that you can draw inspiration from. I fail to think of specifics right now but probably episodes of Doctor Who and Star Trek. And Memento, I guess, altho that’s a very different beast… Would be very cool, anyhow! I thought just the same thing reading through Silisko’s comment before I got to the last sentence!

[JobLeonard]

After all, it's spacetime that's been mangled. So not only is space warping the apple around, so too is time being warped and jumbled leading to a story that might be a bit... weird.

multiple worlds interpretation intensifies

(I know, I know, that's quantum, not relativity)

[diegzumillo]

star Trek is my go-to show whenever I want to daze off lying on the couch and I have nothing else to watch. I mean that in a good way! I love how it's superficially scifi but really it's more about philosophy (phifi?).

So the gameplay demo is moving along nicely. It has 4 levels so far and 6 to go, if I want 10 levels. And I still haven't introduced scale-changing stuff, so there's plenty of stuff to cover. I also have an interesting mechanic to introduce that I haven't implemented yet but it's pretty simple: a trap-door kind of thing. It's more of a hinge. It has two states, up and down. If you fall on it from a specific direction you either change its state and fall through, or you just fall through without changing its state, or you walk on it. It's like one of those wooden hinges people use to make binary counters. Maybe the image makes more sense? Maybe the idea doesn't make sense, I admit I haven't given this a lot of thought yet.



And I fixed a bug in the friction part of the code that a long time ago I had completely given up, that's how stumped I was. And... ah... it was so dumb. The code at some part compares the friction of the two objects, then defines a new quantity depending on these two values. At one point I must have copy-pasted one into the other and forgot to change the second quantity. So basically it was all bodyA.friction - bodyA.friction, and if bodyA.friction == bodyA.friction etc etc. No bodyB on sight. So I fixed it and things have better friction now.

[diegzumillo]

Made a quick mockup of the logic trapdoor. It's not actually coded in, I'm hitting a key to change the state and activate the collider, and took me a few tries to synchronize with the movement. I think this is better than that drawing on the white board I did. Still, kinda hard to see. Maybe it should be wider.

Also, doing this has the same challenges as the one-sided platform, which I wasn't looking forward to working on, but now there are two things that would benefit from it, so I guess I have to now...



EDIT: the illusion would work better if the apple sprite were actually in front of the trapdoor. I re-recorded it