Hello everyone, here is the news from the front.

Intensive Level Design

I spent the last weeks doing intensive level design, in order to have a beta version of the whole game as soon as possible.

I’ve been working quite a bit on the level design of the last level. Unfortunately, I can’t show you any images so as not to spoil the surprise for you.

I also reworked on level 2 to improve it. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about my level 2, which I don’t find good enough. For me, this level is very important because it is a question of “confirming” to players who liked level 1 that the game is good and to make them want to continue. Since it’s one of the oldest levels, it wasn’t designed from the start with the same level design constraints that I use for the other levels, making it a nice level, but not good enough, and a little below the others.

I thought about and experimented a lot on this level and, contrary to my initial planning, I spent several days reworking it. After improving the level and creating many really interesting areas, the result is much better, but the new version now has other flaws, and above all a big problem with the pace: the level is too long!

I was a little discouraged because I thought I could have a level 1,2,3,4 as “gold”(ie almost final) at the end of December and all other levels in “beta”, but unfortunately that won’t be the case. Finally, I decided to put this level 2 work on hold and to focus on the last level again. I return to my original goal of having the game playable from start to finish in good quality (beta for all levels) as soon as possible. Then I would resume my work on level 2, and the other levels, to iterate until everything is perfect.

Here is a small preview of a new area of this level 2 rework.

Full gamepad support

I also started working on the most urgent tasks for the game’s release, including full controller support.

I’ve already completed full controller player control, although there are still a few things to tweak. I’m now working on the game menus and UI, as a lot of their logic needs to be reworked to support controller based navigation.

I have almost finished this task, I still have the inventory which will need a lot of work.

Roadmap

Once I’m done with gamepad support, I will go back on level design to finally have a “content complete” game :)

See you soon,

Arnaud