DAY 32
Today, I did some work on placing trees in the exploration areas and connected exploration areas with the Golden Path.
Here is a birds-eye-view of the area:
This interconnectedness (if that's even a word) allows the player to free-roam beyond the bounds of a "Golden Path" scenario, but at the same time keeping sequence skip issues and out of bounds issues in check.
Here is a screenshot of the area:
The yellow lines represent the optional exploration path and the red lines represent the critical path.
Notice how the critical path is significantly shorter than the optional exploration path. This was semi-deliberate. It was mainly done like this in order to clearly differentiate the types of paths.
Shorter, more often and sharper turning paths with verticality were designed to set and maintain player activity at a more urgent pace. Longer, less sharper and less vertical paths let the player breathe and set his own pace.
Also notice how exploration areas are always big and wide open, while the critical path is always narrower, which also ties in with the pace. But this design has the added (and much bigger) benefit for the player to not get lost in the level and to find his way back to the critical path, especially if a landmark is present (submerged church, village).
Going back to sequence skip and bounds issues, this is not exactly a difficult task, in spite of how much I wrote. If you:
1) keep a very, [b]very[/b] close eye on level layouts and level bounds
2) test the living daylight out of your game.
3) fix issues immediately... and I mean immediately immediately.
...you will have a great time creating levels, as well as the player playing them.
I'm a stickler for all of the above points, but to be honest point 1 is almost like a pet peeve. I cannot state enough how many times I've played through work-in-progress levels from other devs just to find dozens upon dozens of skips and how infuriating it is to find such skips. Also being a stickler for point 1 also makes testing that more enjoyable and productive from a QA point of view.
Speaking of testing, I've tested the wall run more and found some very very annoying issues where you can wall run on angles that are not ~90 degrees (+/- 1 degree). This is solved easily by deactivating the wall run in areas where the player is not meant to wall run, which is the current fix. This can also be solved if there would be less to no wiggle room for the player capsule collision to detect a wall that can be ran on. Meaning the wall strictly has to be at 90 degrees in order to run on it. I'll experiment with this.
Speaking of experiments (man, my segue-ways are killer today) I've ran across a function today that really tickles me in all the right places: Random Point In Bounding Box function. This is as WYSIWYG as it can get: you can essentially spawn any item at a random XYZ coordinate in a given bounding box. This is an absolutely killer way to place collectibles in a certain area.
Let me give context: Did you read the previous post? In it, I stated that there would be letters, notes, documents and [i]drawings[/i]... and audio logs, too, but what is of interest now is the "drawings" part.
The drawings that the player finds correspond to locations in the game world, if looked at from a certain perspective. Those drawings are also an "X marks the spot" kind of thing that will lead the player to collectibles.
If the drawing with the X is specific enough to be found in the game world but vague enough for the player to actively search for it, that would lead to interesting stories from players, interesting experiences for the players and replay value.
For me as a dev, it allows me to implement something that I find thrilling, if a bit old fashioned: digging for "treasure chests". The digging part needs to be investigated, but I think it is doable and can definitely add a lot of replay value, if done right.
Another replay value element that I've thought of today (whoo, somebody stop my segue-ways, they're on FIRE) would be to have spawned certain items at various points in the map. If you think this sounds similar to what was mentioned above, you would be kinda right.
Whereas the above said something about a bounding box, this particular mechanic will use target points (which are essentially spawners without being spawners explicitly). One item can be spawned randomly in three different target points at runtime. Essentially, in one playthrough you might find Item 1 in Target Point 3, next playthrough you might find it in Target Point 1.
Whoa, I wrote a lot today. I think that's enough. See you guys in the next post. Bye