Day 9 Progress
Missed another day yesterday as I spent it doing a lot of housework, however tonight's work is something I'm really proud of and I think makes up for missed time. As I mentioned previously I want to shift gears into building more of the 'horror' bits of the game particularly with art. I knew I wanted a rusty chainlink type floor for the first 'otherworld' section so I started by making two simple chain patterns:
The square platform is just a large pattern colored grey with the small pattern under it colored a tan/brown. The upper right is the simple small pattern used behind the large grey pattern, as well as being recolored and used as a walkway on the bottom of the platform. As I was drawing this I had a bit of inspiration for a new mechanic that I don't want to do into too much detail about quite yet, but those platforms are important to this section so they needed a different color scheme to stand out a little.
I took those patterns and built a quick 'map' of the section using combinations of the platforms and the walkways. For each platform I blended the platform and walkway by extending the orange links into the grey platform, extending the grey links into the orange walkways, curving their 'frames', and blended them to look like the rust is 'taking over' the platforms. Next I thought of the new mechanic and adjusted the level as needed by destroying some of the walkways (erasing chunks and transforming them). Finally, I added some simple posts so it looks like something is holding up the platforms. Long description of the process because I only have the resulting otherworld map:
And finally, in the engine I added some quick orange lighting to give it a little bit more of a 'creepy' vibe. It actually looks pretty good!
Like I said before, for a non-artist, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, especially considering a lot of it was just experimentation. There are a few major things to build in this section yet: another lower 'floor' of rooms, level collision boundaries, the actual working mechanic, etc. But it's a good start!
I've also got the start of the game in my head but I want to put that off for right now so I don't have to go through that every time I run the game. There are a lot of little considerations for showing the player the mechanics and controls organically through usage rather than a big screen with all the controls listed on it (which I probably should have anyways).
Onward!