With my introductions out of the way, I thought today I might show a little more of the first scene. You’ve probably seen it in motion in the first video, but now you can see it all at once.
A developer's eye view of the first scene.
This scene is essentially our tutorial level. In a future post, I'll talk a little bit more about how the individual elements attempt to subtly coax the player into using the basic mechanics, but today I just want to touch a little on the overall goal of this scene.
Essentially: I want to teach the player to move right and upwards. The critical path in this scene specifically dictates this, and the concept gets repeated in the following scenes. The intention is that we can teach the player to consider movement in that direction as progress so in later levels, when the architecture gets more complex, they have an in-built compass that gives them a rough feel for where to go.
The secondary intention is that we can then use that feel against them to hide secrets and alternate paths. You can see a rough implementation of this concept in the pre-alpha video with the backtracking secret. It becomes much more prevalent in the following scenes. You'll see what I mean eventually.
Anyway, tune in next time when I'll do a rough breakdown of each of the other tutorial aspects from this scene. Probably.
