Update

Last week I mentioned that I was readying up my store page for submission to Steam. To my dismay, I was denied because I filled out some of the paperwork incorrectly. The software dev in me wonders why I was able to submit without filling out some of the required fields, but alas I had to read through things again and resubmit. Worse - I thought I resubmitted immediately, but I missed a few button presses to actually submit for re-review. So I'm still waiting on approval. I was hoping to have a fun blog post this week where I could beg for wishlists from folks!

The other thing I'm gearing up for is an announcement trailer and some form of a demo so I can begin playtests on various devices. What that means in practice is that I've got to get all of the placeholder art out of my game and replaced with things I've drawn myself. The last thing I really had to replace was the sprite I was using for doors. In the game, I use doors to enter and exist levels, as well as a way to open the equipment menu from the players "storage" area. This actually went a long way towards making the game feel complete. I'm still missing sound, but other than that I've got a game that you can play at least a few levels start to finish without any hiccups.

Hopefully within the next week or so I'll have a demo build on steam that I can hand out to a few friends and just make sure everything runs ok, and gather some very basic feedback. We're getting somewhere!

Story Time: Level Design

I want to chat a bit about each level in Space Duck: Escape. As I was sketching the design of the game as a whole, I realized that I wanted each level of the game to feel like it followed a similar flow. This is as much for me as the game dev as it is for the player (I hope). I want to be able to have a somewhat consistent difficulty and set up to each level, so it doesn't feel like the difficulty ramp is random. I also want that consistency so that I know when I am "done" building a single level. I'd hate for a single level to take 5 or more minutes on a good run, and then the next one takes 40 seconds. So how did I decide to solve this?

Each level is comprised of 5 sections of equal size. This will largely be transparent to the player unless you're reading my blog posts. The first section of each level doesn't introduce anything new to the player. Only obstacles from prior levels will show up here. The second and third sections introduce this level's new obstacle. A moving spike block, disappearing blocks, etc. The fourth section is the Item section. This still has all previous obstacles, but there's generally 2 routes through the section. One is longer but you can collect the item. One is shorter, but no opportunity for a new piece of equipment. And the final section is the finish line, this is a little easier than the 3 sections before it and is meant to be a bit of a reprieve for the player.

In practice - this means that as you go from level 1 to level 2 the complexity ramps up. From level 2 to level 3, a little more. By the end of a given run, you'll have the possibility of 9 total obstacles interacting with one another, raising the difficulty significantly. The goal here is I want players to feel like they need specific items. Its technically possible to finish a run with no items, but it should be very difficult to do so.

From a level design standpoint this gives me a neat little box to work within. I have 5 sections of each level to design and make cohesive. It makes it so I can playtest each layer and make sure it feels good, the timings of things are nice and tight. The other thing this gives me is a consistent run time of each level. Since the lava is rising from the bottom, the player must complete the level in a certain amount of time. By limiting the sections to 5, on the normal difficulty each level should take around a minute if you're perfect. This lines up with other platformers. I specifically took a look at Super Mario Brothers for the NES. Speed runners of that game seem to complete each level in around a minute without stopping.

The next layer of this is that I've split my 9 levels into 3 "worlds," each with a different aesthetic. This is really to illustrate that as Puddles climbs up, he's moving to higher and higher altitudes and escaping the planet. But from a gameplay perspective this lets me introduce different terrain and use that as a pseudo obstacle as well. I haven't really played around much here as I'm still designing levels for world 1, but I think this should give enough variety and complexity to keep each run interesting.

More to come soon on runs, progress persisting, and the various choices I've made around those concepts soon!

Sign Off

That's it for this week. My goal for this week is to be able to register for October's Steam Next Fest. Registrations are due on September 2nd so I'm a little behind schedule.

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee