So these last weeks we had been working on improving a lot of systems in our game and fixing some bugs we found along the way. In this article, we will explain what kind of things we changed and what we want to improve in the near future. Right now we are going to cover these topics:
- How we improved our level Generator
- New level design.
In the next article we will talk about how we are developing our light painting system and talk about some issues and difficulties with the implementation of the controls on our target platform.
Level generator improvements.
Our game has a system of randomly generated levels. Each level is composed of a grid of 8 by 8 rooms, each room might have connections in their top, bottom, left, or right. We feed the generator with premade rooms designed by hand, each room with a different challenge and structure, and the level generator always create a different layout for each level. We want a level to always have the same difficulty by feeding the generator with hard, medium and easy rooms, that the generator will combine to build a level with hard, medium or easy difficulty doing that and keeping the experience and feeling of that level intact but at the same time presenting a different layout. Another thing we changed was fixing an error that allowed the generator to repeat rooms some times, so we had 2 or even 3 repeated rooms in the same level. We fixed that soo we now have a new, more diverse, and fun experience in each level.
Improving the game design
In terms of game design we are working on the difficulty balance and that is being quite a challenge. We have to design each room by hand having other rooms placement in mind, fine-tuning each room layout soo we don't have dead ends or impossible challenges, and being careful with the placement o probabilistic items like collectibles, hp recharge flowers and now teleport mushrooms too.
With all of that we are trying to find a way to categorize each room difficulty. One possibility is doing that by checking the amount of enemies and their placement, interactions between the enemies in the room, and the environment like traps and spikes. We know that balancing a game can be hard so we are doing a lot of playtests to evaluate how the players deal with the different challenges.
See you next week!
