DAY 35
Took some time off from the game to focus on some me-time AND for some Unreal Engine learning. Even though I did not write a devlog in the past 5 or so days, I did work on the game.
At this point I wanted to focus on the level design and continued working on the second level. I did some work a while back for it, but it wasn't concretely leading anywhere. Yeah yeah, I know, I still have some bugs left unfixed, but they'll eventually get fixed. Thankfully there are only a few of them.
Anyway, Level 2. To recap, I got tremendously inspired by the rock pillars from a Chinese region that I keep forgetting the name of. Looking at pictures of this region, I could see some gameplay creeping out. A grappling hook there, a zipline there, some hanging ropes over there, traditional climbing and ledge climbing over here.
With this in mind, I started rolling out some layouts. And soon discovered that this level is quite a feisty one to create. Earlier I said that I did work on the game, but did not update the devlog. Well, that's because there have been a chain of layout ideas that, when implemented, did not really gel at all. So, implement, playtest, delete. And it kept going on like this for 2 nights in a row with what feels like barely anything modified. In reality, the second level layout is about 20-25% done. There are a few things I'm not happy with, but I am very happy about the reveal of one of the objectives of this level.
So the level layout so far looks like this:
And the reveal to one of the objectives looks like this:
At the moment, the objective is to reach the top of that rock pillar. Once you get there, you will use a zipline to go through the next section of the level.
This reveal certainly has a huge potential, especially if the level is properly set dressed and the composition of the scene is slightly adjusted here and there. Not an expert on scene composition, but I'm getting there slowly.
For this level to be functional I would have to implement the zipline mechanic and the climbing mechanic. Right now I'm debating what kind of climbing: wall climbing or ledge climbing?
- Ledge climbing is more thematically appropriate and can give the player a challenge, but I'm not very certain how it would work in first person. Reference: having particular spots where you can go up or down, the rest would be going left/right.
- Wall climbing is more fluid in terms of gameplay and it's been implemented successfully in other games. A reference would be Doom Eternal, but slower.
Another possibility would be to have a platform with ropes that you can hoist up or down via a pulley or a winch. This I have to give credit to JobLeonard over on TIG forums. This user suggested something similar when I've encountered an ongoing bug in the Rope Swing mechanic. While it wasn't the solution for that issue, I kept this platform with ropes thing in my mind because I felt it had potential. So I'm going to give it a try in this particular mechanic. I don't really know how this will go, since I can't really imagine pulling this off (no pun intended) without some form of rope physics.
Well, that's all I've got for today. See you in the next post, bye.