Alli-Anne - Game A Week #7

Hello again, this is yet another discussion on a small game I've made. I don't have much of a clue of what to write here, so I'll just get into the fun part.

Procedural Generation

After doing a procedural tree generator for last week, I walked into this week with a lot of the fear around procedural generation lifted. I wasn't at all scared to include it in the game, and I think I was right to do that, it's a really simple algorithm that took me a few hours to make but it adds a lot to the game. Here's a basic rundown:

I split the map into a grid of 6x3 pieces, and to generate the map I try to place 5-8 pieces. For each one of these attempts I pick a random grid piece by generating a number between 0-5, and use that to pick the grid piece at the bottom of that x-value. I then check: is there a piece already there, and is there a piece to the left or right? If any of these are true I move up one grid piece and check again until I've either found an empty spot, or found that all three grid pieces for that x-value are unsuitable for placement. If I fail to place a piece, I try again somewhere else, and if I find a suitable spot then I place a piece there. And that's it, I just place the pieces in the grid positions that I found. I only then had to make a few different pieces, some pieces for on the ground, and some for in the air.

Doing a procedural generator has made me a lot more confident in using procedural generation, and if you can I recommend trying to make a procedural generator too, you never know when the experience can come in handy, like it did for me.

Finishing Early

Surprisingly enough, I finished a day early, which gave me a fair amount of time to think about polish, not something I get to do too often. I thought I'd spend a lot of the time making some music for the game, but after a few hours I finally realised that I'm so bad at making music it actively DETRACTS from the overall experience. So I decided against it. And with that I had a lot of time to mull over the small bits, and fixing bugs turned features turned bugs and making the game more clear. It's pretty amazing how a few bugs turned into features (mainly small ones), and then how some seemed like decent ideas to leave in and then turned sour. An example of a good bug is actually the exploder's movement, originally they were just gonna slide, but because of friction they actually started to tumble after the player. I saw it and thought that it looked way better and gave the enemy a bit more character and made it easier to identify, so I incorporated that idea into the enemy's design. An example of a bad bug was that the double doors doubling persisted after death. I thought it would be a good idea, but really I think it just turned into an excuse to not balance the proper play route, because you could get 1000+ rewards on your first door just by stacking double doors to that amount, dying, and opening the first door on a new run. Don't get lazy, me.

Overall this is one of my favourite projects to date, and I'm almost tempted to spend a month or two turning this into a proper game, albeit a small one. I already have the idea of the background, setting and rough direction, so it's not like it's too hard. If the reception is positive enough I probably would, but I doubt it. Either way, I'm going to have to go on break for some time, life's come knocking. See you when I next see you.