Tobon Toons

Whoops! Looks like Sarah and Auzzel found themselves in an explosive turn of events!

Jumping into 2024 by summing up the last month's work, before going into a yearly summary.

The main goal I settled on was roughing out the level layout for chapter 3. This involves initial placement of level geometry, obstacles, enemies, important items and collectibles, refining room size and connections, and initial placement of characters for cutscenes and talking.

Enemies are still incomplete, so it's not possible to start testing them out yet, but it's in a position now to inform what a player will do in the chapter and allowing me to refine it.

Excluding subareas, here's the current geometry of it:

To reiterate, Chapter 3 takes place in Snow Machinia, the city on top of the Mount Glitteroam. Poppin and Jupa will be venturing through different locations of it on their way to the Bicentennial Ball.

Part of that route comes across a robotic crane at a factory, which acts as a mini-boss:

I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out, being able to grab one of the adventurers and force you to whack him enough times to free them.

Part of working on the map is figuring out what else obstacles will need to function properly, and I started that process after finishing the map.

You can see a bit of it here, involving buttons that require a larger weight press down, stalactites that reform after falling, and making the platforms you can cut able to move up and down, similar to the hanging barrels.

There was also some private testing of Chapter 2 with a couple of friends, and their feedback has been logged as stuff to fix in the future.

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This was a productive month by my standards, I think making bosses and level design is pretty rewarding, though I don't think other people are able to share my enthusiasm for it. I've been wondering if I'm sharing too much and should limit these kind of updates to text. I'll think about it though, since it's something that helps me out personally in keeping track of progress.

Next month, I was leaning towards working on the chapter 2 fixes from testing, and working on the enemies for chapter 3. There's about 10 new enemies in total, while chapters 1 and 2 had only five new enemies respectively, so it'll be quite a bit. But it might take a backseat to some important new years resolutions I wrote for myself, dealing with other life things.

That's all for now!