Week 4: First Level

After some eye opening feedback on our level, we yet again, had another long discussion on the boss. It became clear to us that the concept of our boss, and the level design for it didn’t quite match the rest of our game’s relaxing atmosphere. It felt like a break in continuity to suddenly introduce a mechanic where the player was tested on their reaction time more so than their puzzle solving like the other levels. so we have decided to scrap the boss level altogether and leave it only in story cutscenes. 

With the removal of boss level, we now had to reconsider if we still wanted the death mechanic. What should happen if the player makes a wrong move and drops an ice block on themselves? It seemed reasonable to allow the player to simply make the mistake and view the consequences to learn the move was wrong. So we decided to reintroduce player death back into the game. 

After watching some people play the game, we had come to realize how easy it was to “cheese” some level obstacles with spamming specific paints, such as raising a block underneath the player until they are over the wall. So what should happen? We decided to introduce a reverting mechanic, if a block was already manually painted before, painting over it with another colour would revert the previous effect, and players would also be unable to paint a block of the same colour manually twice. 

This week we also managed to add in the code and functionality for the teleporting creature, as well as freezing the player during npc actions to prevent interaction bugs. Controller support was added. Also, we managed to get an early version of undo finally working! Although not without the occasional bugs.