DAY 44
Work on the second level continued today. Worked in short bursts, with plenty of productivity and plenty more of playtesting.
Here's how the level has grown:
And here is the big waterfall area:
Oh, you see that little blob in the lower middle of the screen? That is the actual size of the player character. Thougt you'd like some size comparison.
And yes, I'm pretty aware that the character looks tiny instead of the area looking big, but that is because of the scaled assets. They are abnormally large and so are their textures. That throws you off and I know. So I'm gonna need you to get all the way off my back on this. The final assets will be proportionally scaled and everything will look normal...well, normally big.
It's a slow but steady growth and you can thank playtesting for this. Speaking of which...
Playtesting the area revealed that verticality is needed here, so I obliged. Before playtesting, the pillars were quite level. There was variation in height, but insufficient for the dynamic approach I had in mind for the level. The pillars are still quite level if viewed from afar, but the gameplay verticality is more accentuated now.
Half of the pillar area is done. For tomorrow, I'll be continuing to work on the pillar area and my goal here is to accentuate verticality even more. I am seriously considering making the critical path more zig-zag-y, as well. So much that the player can move along the cliff on the left hand side and before he/she knows it, he/she is on the cliffs on the right hand side. This adds to the variety of the area: at the beginning, the pillars are spaced somewhat narrowly in the canyon. In the half that follows, they will be spaced more apart and as mentioned, the verticality will be even more accentuated.
One thing that I did not find a solution to is what happens when the player reaches the big waterfall.
The area is open and, as mentioned in the previous post, the player is open to explore the river that follows from the big waterfall. The problem is that when the exploring happens, the player will invariably reach the beginning of the second level. One solution to this is to have ziplines that will take him back from the beginning of the second level to the big waterfall.
I am strongly considering ending this level with a man-made dam, to be placed at the end of the canyon. And have a light puzzle in which the player must find some switches to lower the ladders so that the player can reach the top of the dam. But as a counter-weight, I do not have a lot of confidence that ending a dynamic level with a puzzle will be a great idea. But only playtesting will be the judge of that.
So, that's all I've got for today. See ya in the next post. Bye