This week's been a mixed bag. A minor medical issue prevented me from working my part time job. So there go two weeks of income, However while recuperating, I've been able to work on the game quite a lot.
Programmed in a whole bunch of tools that make level creation easier and more intuitive. The tools have cut down on the amount of times I need to compile the game to check the changes of visual aspects such as lighting.
I'm approaching the point where I can check off the giant checkbox on my To Do list. The completion of the batch of levels that we've started over a year. The batch that was started as the "DEMO" called the Trial Course 6. It took so long as I was not completely committed to this project and was distributing my time among a lot of other stuff. That pretty much ended two weeks ago. The whole workload was made up of 6 Ambient and 24 Challenge chambers and were divided between myself and Tim. Best part is that we have not played each others levels yet. We've played our own levels by ourselves so we know they are pass-able but other than that, we've been saving the experience for some sort of a recording session opportunity for your gaming channel. Here are some clips of the levels I've been building to complete my share of the task:
The level building starts with -THE CHALLENGE- where we drop in a dev_mode object that makes simple collision blocks be visible. THAT is all that we need to build our levels. All the purdy stuff comes after. Once we're satisfied with the flow of the level, Tim, transfers the level to me, where I outfit it with tiles, populate with decals and foliage and fix any technical irregularities. I then pluck another dev object in that separates the camera from the player, thus allowing me to float around the level, setting up the lighting, light masks, shadows and aerial perspective with all the parameters
For the past two weeks I've worked on new Levels, the Lighting system, mechanics, added behaviors to the hazards and now that that's all behind me, I can concentrate on actually polishing the levels visually. Gotta say, the tools really do make the process faster.
The resulting levels after all the polish:
I', going back to work in a few days as the treatment is ending which means that I won't be able to do daily development live-streams anymore. If you'd like to support me and my projects so I can start working on them full time, you can do so via my Patreon! I will be scheduling the live-streams using youtube's event scheduler so you'd like to catch the livestream, make sure to hit the Subscribe button and hit the Bell icon next to it to get the notification when I go live!
