Level 50!

6 April 2013

I worked on several new levels today. The playable levels now goes up to 49, and I am now working on level 50, which is one of the important core levels I had in my sketches. Due to time constraints, I might be cutting down the maximum number of levels in the game to 60 too, which is a good thing. The game has far more levels than I intended.

New feature: Spikes can be destroyed and plays the following animation:

I kind of love animating objects, so this was really fun to do. It plays at 12 frames per second.
There is only one level that implements this kind of dynamic spikes. It is possible to code it such that all levels use this new destroyable spike, but that will take some time to implement, so I will not be doing it yet. I am pretty excited to see what people think about it.

Another simple recolouration I did a few days back is this shimmering purple key. It's different from the other keys because it can only be collected by two players simultaneously. Rather than a change in colour, notice the key will turn darker and lighter as it rotates, which is another stark contrast to differentiate it from other keys. Moving on from MS Paint has allowed me to do cooler stuff like this.

A new level background which was resized from my original night city background drawing for a bonus level.

A draft of level 50...

A draft of a special lamp post level

This was the lighting when I was trying out. Li Hao helped me decide the final lighting, which looks much more realistic and natural than the above. The final lighting:

 20% lit

100% lit

TThis was possible due to Flixel's blend mode, which has overlay as one of the options. Though this wasn't part of the initial design. The initial design was just a dark maze, without any light source. But Li Hao said that fog of darkness isn't a good way of making a level difficult. And since I have already done fog of darkness in Level 20 before, I decided to do this lampost lighting effect, which makes the level more interesting (at the cost of some extra production time though. It took a whole night to implement this level, but the results were pretty good).

The colour and wrong direction of the spikes as seen in the screenshot was later adjusted, in case you were wondering about that. The last few levels took a much longer development time than early levels, especially the levels with "AI" and special effects and cutscenes. I'm very happy with the progress so far.