Update

First - I missed an update last week. I had quite a bit of life and "day job" things stack up that took my attention away from this. While that sucks, I feel good that I was somewhat ahead of schedule on things, so that didn't put me too far behind. I'm still planning on doing weekly updates here, so lets get to it!

This week I spent some time getting my Steam Store page ready to submit. This was a little more involved than I thought it would be. Both getting enough assets for all of the various ways Steam displays your game and actually learning about how Steam structures branches, packages, etc. The exciting part is that as you start to fill out all the description text and add the various images, Steam lets you see your store page in a "beta" or unreleased fashion. This went a long way towards making this whole experiment feel real to me.

The other thing I worked on was getting all of my game icons in Godot working properly. This way people who install my game will get the correct icon for their desktop shortcuts, or in their start bar on Windows. Again, more time consuming than I'd have thought, but it goes a long way towards making the game feel like a real product. There are just so many of these little tasks that I seem to over look until I sit down to do them. Thankfully there's plenty of help from the Godot community that I was able to just power through and get everything looking the way I want.

Story Time: Equipment Brainstorming and Playtesting

I know last time I said I'd talk about the gameplay loop, but I'm gonna push that one more week so that I can talk about the equipment we've made. That should build the story a bit better for the game play loop and why I think what I landed on makes sense.

A few weeks ago I talked about really enjoying the equipment from Zelda and incorporating a similar system into my game. I really dove into this idea, thinking about how many equipment slots I could have, what constitutes an active equipment vs a passive. Thinking of items like a parasail vs the metal boots. Talking them over with my wife while walking the dog and really trying to get a good long list of equipment that I could try to design levels around. All told I think we had something like 20 ideas to start, but I wanted to build all the structure first so that I can just keep adding items as I go.

So to test out all of the functionality around unlocking new equipment, equipping it to a specific button, unequipping, etc. I started with the simplest idea we had, Double Jump. After all - we're doing a game where we want to go up and quickly, double jump makes a ton of sense. I initially implemented this as a passive, and it would just always let you jump once while you were in the air. Fairly easy to do in Godot since their built in physics has a way to tell if your character is on the ground. I started building levels with this item in mind. Making platforms that you can't reach with a single jump, but if you had a well timed second jump you could. Effectively adding "shortcuts" to levels. This was working great. The levels were possible, but difficult without the equipment and much easier with it.

The problem started to present itself when I started to time myself with and without this equipment. Remember, this is a game where lava is rising from the bottom and you have to move quickly. I want the player to feel that pressure some. Without the double jump, the levels were frantic. With the double jump, they were a breeze. I was completing them in less than half the time, totally ruining the difficulty of the game. This item was clearly too strong so I went back to the drawing board. I need to tweak this idea to not make it quite so powerful.

First I tried to just limit the height of the second jump. Not truly 2 full jumps, but a jump and then another half jump. This still felt a little strong, and also was just weird to control as a player. Having 2 different jump distances was confusing. Then I tried forcing the second jump to only be available when you are on your way back down. This also didn't really fix it - the second jump still let you ascend at too fast a pace. The next thing I tried was making the equipment an Active equipment, and the benefit of the equipment being on a timer. So you have to activate this item, and then you get the bonus to jump for 10 seconds or so. Afterward the equipment is on cooldown for a few seconds. This started to feel a lot better. You had to pick and choose when you wanted the extra help, and if you chose poorly you couldn't use it again for a good chunk of the level. Still the true double jump felt like too much. So I made one more tweak - what if it wasn't a double jump, but just a jump boost? It just makes your first jump 20% higher or something like that. This played really well to me. I added some indicators to the player model to indicate the duration of the jump boost - and a countdown clock in the HUD indicating the item can't be used for another X seconds.

This sort of iteration on my equipment ideas I think is going to be the norm as I dive into level design and difficulty. It was a really good feeling to take something that was clearly game breaking, and just keep tweaking until the concept felt good to play. This is the sort of stuff that makes Game Dev fun. I almost certainly am not going to go where I think I'm headed with this, but by playing it out and being open to changing my ideas, I think I can make something challenging yet fair and fun to play.

Sign Off

That's it for this week. In the next week or two, I'm hopefully going to get to the point where my Steam page is live and I can start uploading my game assets and installing them on the various machines I've got around here. I'm a little worried that this part will go sideways on me, but hey that's why we try it and test it out!

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee