Development progress #2

Hi, again. Here is the recap for the latest updates. Spoiler: they are huge!

Predictable random

Advanced Tutorial is a game mostly about procedural generation. Almost every part of the game generated randomly: velocities, directions, sizes, modifications and so on. And because it’s a game about the pain in the ass, it would be nice to share generated world with your friends, especially if you was able to complete it. But in that case the game has to store a really lot of data in database regarding the generated worlds for each player.

So, in order to make it possible, Advanced Tutorial uses procedural generation based on a seed value. That means you start a game and a random seed is generated. That seed is the basement of procedural generation. This gives an ability to take your seed and share it with your friend. Then if he starts a game using this seed and he will get exactly the same world as you did.

Nice, right? At the moment I just moved all the random functions to seed based, but the actual ability to start with someone’s seed is the topic to be implemented in nearest future.

Next level screen

I’ve already wrote about the modifications and how they work. Let me remind you. There are four objects in the game: coins, platforms, character and bombs. Modification applies to an object and endows it with a new behavior. Every level in the first chapter has one object with applied modification.

So, I added a screen between levels which shows the number of current level and shows emoji of selected object which got a modification. Which modification exactly is applied to an object is unknown. The player has to explore it himself. Still thinking if I should show the title of modification too or not, what do you think?

The first Chapter is finished!

That is probably the most excited news! Now it’s possible to finish the game from start to the end! There is still lack of some reward screen at the end, but.. just try to get to the end :) Honestly, I couldn’t, so I will tweak the difficulty settings more.

3 ❤ instead of 1

As I wrote above, the difficulty turned out to be high, so I had to add more lives. So now the character has 3 chances to make an error within a chapter.

Reworked HUD

Just a reference to this update.

Level design

The game has only one level in terms of level design: there are always three platform which are stay exactly on the same place. But sometimes you may get stuck between two platforms at the right side of the screen when a bomb is moving towards to you from the left. In 99% it’s unavoidable. So I increased the space between platforms and world boundaries in order to allow a character to jump down from the both sides of any platform.

Check out the result (image is clickable):

RIP: vertically moving platforms

One of platform modification was vertically moving platforms. But the more I playtested it the more I found that there are a lot of issues with that! For example, when bombs bounced off from moving vertically platform, their velocity summed up and reached out some incredible values!

The other one is that when a character stays between moving towards each other platforms, the upper one was pushed the player down through the lower one. That’s not the last issue, so I decided to replace this modification to something more stable and predictable. But of course I can’t say you what this new modification is about :) You have to find it yourself!

That’s all for today. Stay tuned and see you soon, bye!