A New Down
- 4 Devlogs
- 6 Total hours
My submission to The Very Serious Juniper Dev Game Jam
Added a title screen and polished some of the transitions
The title screen really helps tie the game together, and makes it feel much more like a real game. I found two fonts on Itch to use for my game—Chonkly and 3x3 Mono. Both are CC0, and I’ve yet to use 3x3 Mono, but I might use it for smaller text later.
The transition between levels and when you die and the level resets both looked pretty bad, flashing a gray screen and looking quite jittery. I hunted around a bit for the source of the problem, and eventually discovered that it was due to my camera’s position smoothing. I fixed this by calling reset_smoothing() in the relevant places.
All in all, this really made the game feel more complete, and I’m really happy with where it’s going. In the future, I need to add more levels and the mechanics that go with those. If I have a large number of levels, I may also need a level select menu.
Added a level system with loading and transitions
Touching the goal blocks will now trigger a transition to the next level, and to test out this system, I developed two new levels for a total of three.
I decided to dynamically load level scenes by looking for scenes/levels/0.tscn, scenes/levels/1.tscn, etc. This system worked well, but when reaching the goal for the next level, it would try to load a nonexistent file and crash. I fixed this by calling a win() function instead of loading a level file when the file cannot be found.
Next, I plan to add a few more levels, or maybe work on some of the main UI. The newer levels will introduce other special blocks and mechanics.
Added sticky blocks
These blocks are the first of several that I plan to add in order to make the game more interesting and make for better levels. Whenever you run into a sticky block, you snap to its position and stop moving, while the level continues to rotate. Once stuck, you can launch yourself in any direction by pressing that key.
I decided to add these because I thought it would be cool to have levels where you launch yourself through a large number of sticky blocks, and they add a method of transportation other than the basic rolling and jumping.
I’m thinking about ideas for other blocks, and as soon as I have a few I’ll start to build some levels.
Completed the basic mechanics such as the rotating level, rolling, and jumping
I had to go through several different iterations to get the rotation to work—at first I tried to rotate the player and have gravity change with them. I thought that this would eliminate issues with collisions, but it turns out this was the wrong approach. Then I tried rotating the level, and this had the problems I expected—the player constantly phased through the walls of the level and didn’t move very well. Finally I decided to use a rigid body for the player, which worked, but meant I had to use forces and torques instead of the kinds of movement I was used to. Eventually I got everything to work and I’m happy with the result.
For this prototype I used very simple art and a pixelation shader that I modified from one of my other projects, but I think it actually turned out looking pretty good, so I might keep it.
Next I plan to get some levels prototyped and some of my secondary mechanics developed. Hopefully after this I’ll have something good enough to post on Itch.
