Osaze Devlog #3 - Dynamic Vertical Mazes and Environmental Bone Interactions

Overview

This update tests environment reactions to bones and procedural vertical maze generation.

The focus of this weeks development was incorporating more of the bone and skull throwing mechanics into the game. I did this in the following ways:

• An environmental collapsing corridor which is triggered when players throw a bone or another player's skull at the cracks in the ceiling.
  • The idea is to incorporate this in the future to allow players to use it to block off enemy paths, at the potential expense of blocking of their own paths or damaging other players.
• An environmental boulder generator (collapsable ceiling) that drops a boulder that can be used allow other players to reach higher levels.
• An environmental collapsable floor that is triggered when a specified number of bones worth of weight enters the trigger of the trap. This causes players to fall down onto the floor beneath them.

Collapsible Corridor

Ceiling Boulders 

Collapsible Floor Trap

I also spent a lot of time working on a procedural maze generate that would stack mazes on top of each other and allow players to climb up to higher and more complex mazes indefinitely. The goal for this week was to make this a sort of playtest where players could compete to try to get to the highest floor possible without all of them dying to the Kraken enemy or falling damage.

Some cool effects were added regarding the Kraken too. Its behavior is now based on the following attributes:

• Which players are on its floor and can be reached.
• Which players have bones on them and are no just skulls
• Which players are closest to its current location

I hope to play test this more rigorously in the future to determine how to best balance the Kraken's difficulty for players

Two builds were created for this devlog. The first, ending in local, is for testing purposes in singleplayer. The second is for testing with other people over Steam's transport API, however, I have not had the chance to verify that this actually works.

Controls

• RMB: Throw Bone
• J: Super Jump
• B: Place Bone
• V: Pick Up Bone

Next Steps

There are quite a few tasks I'd like to take on for next steps. The first, and foremost, is getting the game to a point where family and friends can start playtesting it, without running into gamebreaking bugs. Currently the level designs we've been testing all feature some bugs that render the game unplayable. The goals is to has out these bugs and prepare to shar the game with others starting June 1st.

Along with fixing these bugs, it would be nice to have a tutorial for the new players to try and learn about the bone mechanics of the game. Many of the controls are currently unintuitive and not communicated by the game. This week, we should squeeze in some time to develop how this will be communicated by the game.

Lastly, I'd like to work on merging the level ideas that we've come up with this past month. I believe that it would be interesting to have either some of the floors of the vertical maze that I've generated be Evan's dirty bubble levels, or just have these dirty bubble levels as offshoots that players can enter from the maze area.

Incorporating some of the level models that Justin created would also be a great goal to include in the level before the playable demos!