One kid with a simple goal; Scale a mountain. He is halted quickly because of a platform that is simply refusing to move. It is a religious platform. One that only obeys members of the platform temple sect. The kid must now wander the halls of a long forgotten temple in search of the altar where he will swear allegiance. Is your skin tough enough to endure the traps and challenges that await?
This game should've been out ages ago. I initially started working on it just to test the capabilities of my GMS2 engine. But, as time went on I got more and more ideas for it. Eventually I lost track of time and found myself with more urgent matters on my plate. When I picked up development four months later I had a blast finishing what I had started. Progress was made relatively quickly during december, and now there's a lot for me to learn about the process I had in that time. Thus, I dedicate this page to documenting one aspect of this game's development.
I started out by experimenting with how I could get the player to use the platforms in both directions that they would move. After the first two renditions of the screen I realized that this gimmick was a bit more complex than it seemed. I really felt like it needed to be introduced a little bit better so that it would feel less awkward to pull of.
The next two screens attempt to include some sort of introductory section before going all out with the gimmick. These two attempts were helpful as they started giving me an idea as to how I could implement this a bit more gracefully. But I ended up not using these as well since they still needed a bit more polish. Additionally I felt that these rooms were sacrificing the straightforward room layout that the temple had had so far. I wanted it to look a bit more approachable.
Attempt number five got close. It was indeed playable. Just still, really awkward to pull off. This was especially true for the last part which was going to have horizontally moving platforms that go vertically once touched. I also wanted the platforms to all have the same movement speed as I felt it would contribute to making it more playable. Sadly I had a hard time doing that in attempt 5. Luckily attempt number six ended up checking all of my boxes, and thus it was used in the final game.
From the very beginning I knew that I wanted to do something with the attributes that platforms have where they add their horizontal speed to the player's. My first idea was to have a segment where the player is forced to hold a direction while jumping from platform to platform. The push that platforms give the player horizontally could make for some interesting jumps. But, in the end I decided against using this idea. I meandered for a bit until I found out that I could make inverts easy by using horizontally moving platforms.
Since getting used to doing inverts with platforms is a bit difficult I decided that it would be best to have it be the first thing of the save. If I had stopped there the save would have been a little bit short, so I decided to add a little puzzle into the mix.
Finally I ended on a presentable screen. Looking back on it now I could have taken the gimmick several steps further. Doing that would have taken a substantial amount of time and several more outtakes though. It certainly would have been interesting. In the end I decided to move on not wanting to spend my entire day on just one screen.
What I hope to achieve with this "post" is to have something to look back on and learn from. In the future I'd like to make games much faster as I have a lot more ideas. So, having a reference to look back on and think; "ahh, that's why that took so damn long" will certainly be helpful. Additionally I'm curious to hear more about people's process and approach to making games. I hope that this might spark a discussion or two about this very topic. - Synth