Hi! Long time no see. Believe it or not my last post has been the hardest to write so far. Prolly I need more adjusting. This writing "thing" is somwhat new to me. I usually like things to be in my head. The other thing I'll adress is the lack of consistency with the devlog. As these two months were very busy I was unable to find time to write on my progress with the game. I will correct that in the future.
This time I'll write about the importance of creating guidelines before starting or in the early stages of the development. I as a noob started creating level after level, section after section, obstacle after obstacle. The only thing I tought about was how this current section worked and looked. I didn't think about the height of the floor for instance or the transition between obstacles or the flow of the whole level. I wasn't without a plan thought. Like I said the the beggining I knew what the general feel of the game should be but I stopped there. I should have gone deeper than that. But now after creating 8 levels and going throught each one atleast 3-4 times I have those guidlines I wish I made before starting. They somwhat naturally "came" to me. Like in the beggining the floor height was different. Sometimes it was 1.5 meters, other times 0.75 or some random number like 1.23664785. But after putting block after block I saw that 0.5 looked just right so I then had to go back and make all other blocks that same height. That had some problems, nothing serious though just extra work. In the game I have rails like train rails but here the ball rolls on them. Depending on the space between them the ball rolls smoother or not, or just falls.. So without turning my brain on I just made them different every time. Finally after the 4+ iteration on I don't remember which level I noticed that the ball rolled great and looked when the space was 1.25 meters. The sphere itself has almost the same diameter. There are more examples like this but I won't bore you with them. Suffice to say that although each one doesn't take that much time to fix, when you take them all you lose alot of time. It's subtle so you don't really feel the magnitude of it. Ohh the lttle things..
Here is a list of the things I wish I knew before starting:
After realizing these blasphemous errors I went back from the first level to the last and enlightened them. I myslef was amazed of the quality jump after these little things were adjusted. There was one level that was made so bad that I just redid it entirely. Now that same level is one of my best works (according to me). Soon the game will be ready and my worst nightmare will come and that's... naming the damn thing ofcourse!
This time I'll write about the importance of creating guidelines before starting or in the early stages of the development. I as a noob started creating level after level, section after section, obstacle after obstacle. The only thing I tought about was how this current section worked and looked. I didn't think about the height of the floor for instance or the transition between obstacles or the flow of the whole level. I wasn't without a plan thought. Like I said the the beggining I knew what the general feel of the game should be but I stopped there. I should have gone deeper than that. But now after creating 8 levels and going throught each one atleast 3-4 times I have those guidlines I wish I made before starting. They somwhat naturally "came" to me. Like in the beggining the floor height was different. Sometimes it was 1.5 meters, other times 0.75 or some random number like 1.23664785. But after putting block after block I saw that 0.5 looked just right so I then had to go back and make all other blocks that same height. That had some problems, nothing serious though just extra work. In the game I have rails like train rails but here the ball rolls on them. Depending on the space between them the ball rolls smoother or not, or just falls.. So without turning my brain on I just made them different every time. Finally after the 4+ iteration on I don't remember which level I noticed that the ball rolled great and looked when the space was 1.25 meters. The sphere itself has almost the same diameter. There are more examples like this but I won't bore you with them. Suffice to say that although each one doesn't take that much time to fix, when you take them all you lose alot of time. It's subtle so you don't really feel the magnitude of it. Ohh the lttle things..
Here is a list of the things I wish I knew before starting:
- Floor height. (yeah thats right)
- Space between rails.
- Standart coloring of different shapes. For instance a cylinder is black, a rectangle can be grey, dark blue etc.
- Level progression - after a hard obstacle there will follow an easy-medium or easy obstacle.(that right here is a time consumer)
- To make a blueprint of things I suspected I'll be using more than once.
After realizing these blasphemous errors I went back from the first level to the last and enlightened them. I myslef was amazed of the quality jump after these little things were adjusted. There was one level that was made so bad that I just redid it entirely. Now that same level is one of my best works (according to me). Soon the game will be ready and my worst nightmare will come and that's... naming the damn thing ofcourse!
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