Lot's of progress. We've got levels 1-6 pretty much in the bag and uh (look at the gif now), they are fun.
It's a slow build, though the first level is scandalously short. It's just a controls tutorial basically with some minor obstacles. Jumping running walking dodging. That sort of thing. Then we build. Each level introduces 1 or 2 new features (except Levels 3 and 6 which are just kind of explosions of all the features.
Also built a very simple Menu screen that can stand in for the demo (which will be levels 1-5), and while it isn't perfect, I think it's not too bad!
The game's gotten pretty hard as well, so I've had to insert a much more traditional checkpoint system. This is a little bit of a disappointment to me because I really liked the idea of having to grow trees as checkpoints, but .... well, you'll see.
We also got a new texture that's making it a lot easier to recreate the kind of blurry hopelessness that I think we get to see in the last two paintings of Voyage of Life. I'm really, really happy with how this has turned out and the game is going to parallel the paintings very nicely.
Sprout's Tale in Old Age
I've also implemented a system of finding hidden collectibles, which gives this *really* satisfying chime whenever you find one. Here is a picture of a found collectible, though ultimately I've decided to go another way with the collectible itself. Instead of lines from poems it's going to be... well, you'll see.
All in all, I'm just really happy with how it's coming along and I can't wait to have people start telling me how terrible it is.
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Finding collectibles isn't too hard, but some take
skill to reach.
TLDR: Racing ahead, smashing bugs, fixing features, making levels. Ideally it'll be a 5-10 hour game, but who knows. I'm a total amateur.
