#puddledock

Last week I worked on 3 different games. How’s that for multitasking!?

On Saturday I fixed some super minor UI stuff in Star-Pit Starship and pushed a new build to Steam. I won’t bother writing up patch notes since the changes were so minor. 

After that I worked on Slamoids! I made a bunch of optimization changes to ensure gameplay runs smoothly. There were also some UI tweaks that I made to the pre-game screen that had been nagging me for quite some time. Overall the game looks and plays much better, so I’m glad I took the time to work on it yesterday. 

The bulk of the work last week however was on the HTML5 game (my goal this week is to come up with a title for it so I can stop calling it “the HTML5 game”).

My goal was to knock out as many of the remaining features as possible so I can get started on artwork. I’m pretty close. As usual whenever I implement new features, I now have to take time to test them all together and hammer out any kinks. 

Here’s some stuff I got working:

Land Formations: I can now define certain arrangements of tiles that will cause special events to happen. For instance, right now if you place 4 water tiles next to each other, fish will spawn in them.

Growing Plants: I now have a growing system in game that allows the user to place seeds in the world that will then transform into whatever we tell them to. Rather than being time-based, the system is based on steps taken by the player. For instance, right now I say that when the user places a tree seed on a dirt tile, it will grow into a tree after the user takes 10 steps. I’m trying to tie as much as possible in with the player’s steps since that is the core mechanic for updates in the world.

Tile Transforming: Rather than trying to design a world generation algorithm that produces realistic land formations, I’ve decided to let the game place the tiles however it wants (within reason) and the user can transform those tiles via placing seeds that they craft on the tiles they wish to change. So if the player thinks there is too much water, they can “grow” dirt tiles to replace as many water tiles as they want. Newly grown tiles will also have a chance of spawning buried collectibles for you to find. 

With the level sizes being so small, I feel like these changes help to add more depth to the world, and allow it to transform however the player sees fit. 

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.