My game is now near completion, so during the last week I will share you a brief summary of the project!
START:
Development started 4 months ago and I immediately worked on the character run cycle! This was how it turned out, it was no different from how it looks today:
Next, I had created the tilesets to get a specific look for the game! While the old tilesets weren’t bad, they were super dark/ muddy and didn’t suit the drawing artstyle I ended up wanting to go with! I ended up redoing the tilesets after that!
(Tileset Comparison)
Later in development, I had made the backgrounds, the game consists of 2 background layers that scrolls at 2 different speeds in order to simulate a 3D look known as Parallax Scrolling! The far one was often something like clouds in the sky that scrolled pretty slow and in front of it would be something closer like hills which scrolled faster! Making the backgrounds themselves, I had later put a black outline around them with creates the drawing style I’m going for!
Next, I had worked on the physics for the game: The physics were also mostly the same as the end product with minor glitches that were fixed in the final version! The first thing I knew I needed to get was a good prototype! This is important to do early because if I find a flaw and have to scrap the idea, I’ve lost lots of content I’ve made! This did actually happen early in development because I had a few different design ideas that didn’t support the exploration aspect i was going for! After the basic physics engine was made I added more cool stuff like the wall jump!
While level design wasn’t the most difficult part of development, it was easily the most time consuming! One of the big issues I was having was that I had made the choice to double my tile size to double the resolution but it had made level design much harder since my laptop would begin to lag while placing the tiles! Because I would have to redo the physic and all of the levels because of this issue I ended up sticking with it!
Now talking about the actual level design, I was going for not only levels with exploration aspects but I was also going for a style where they’re are multiple ways to over come an obstacle! The most basic one is where you could either jump and grab a vine to get across, or you could just use the double jump!
(Show Level Design Vid)
Thank you very much for reading this post! My game will be released very shortly and will post once it is!
