Posted August 21, 2022 by illtemperedtuna
Yesterday it was so clear what the gameplan was. Fix items, simplify spawns, easy peasy. Everything will fall into place.
But as I cross off day 1, I'm now thinking of the path forward and I'm realizing spawns and zones and all of that is a lot more up in the air than I initially thought.
It's time for me to start thinking about how I craft the world of seacrit, and make it easier to iterate and create modular areas. I'm very happy to say that I'm giong to bite the bullet and take a detour today and start building forward in a way that isn't reckless and will serve to allow me to very rapidly change the size and scope of the world on the fly to match the emerging gameplay moving forward.
Is SeaCrit more fun as an open world? Or as smaller arenas with more care given to the play? Should i shuffle the player along well crafted, tight play areas? Or should the explore large areas of open ocean with the random fish creating the play? Or should it be all of these things!? I don't know yet, and as it stands the game is a thousand little pieces of rocks thrown into one large chunk of terrain with tons of NPCs strewn about, spawn areas, and points of interest uniquely crafted into each area. This is a very bad way of attacking level design and as it stands it's making me not want to push forward.
So it's time to prefab it up, it's time to file these assets in a way that makes building things up far easier. Rather than thinking I want a new level I won't have to build it up from scratch, i'll simply clone an already existing working modules and mash them together. Metroid was a game with a huge sprawling world, but each screen of content was peiced together from pre crafted chunks of a world that worked for the play of metroid.
I'm going to try to drill this into my head now, as I ALWAYS forget to keep things small and not generate tons of content. I'm going to create just a few zones for now to perfect the pipeline.
I'm looking forward to being able to quickly throw in an entirely new region, slap a unique zone name on it, give it unique lighting and spawn lists and start building up a nice little world to get lost in. In the past I made these areas quite large, I'm going to err on the side of making htings to small, and build up as needed. It's easier to build things up than try to shrink things down, and it allows for rapid prototyping of play in other areas.
I'm feeling out a lot of things at once right now, what's the flow of items like? How fast should players get pearls? Is it more fun to buy things or to find them? So many questions, deep into dev and still trying to figure out what this game is. Need to figure out what AI and fish arrangements are interesting, and the progression of all of these things that feed and fight with each other. How many seacrits should there be? How hard should they be to find? You can go mad wondering about these things.
Only thing to do is to get to work! Ok, got a blog entry done, wanted to get the last one off my front page because it was a little whacky.
I'm starting to get really sick of deleting level design OVER AND OVER again because I did not build it up in a truly modular, iteratable, and reusable fashion. That ends now. Time to get the scalpel out and torture this amalgamation of poorly planned crap again.