Placeholder Game Level Finally Replaced With The Real Thing

Well, it's been long enough, and in fact seems like forever, that my blank, grid box test level has been on show - but no more! We now have actual game play in actual game play levels!

We also still have Placeholder Player Cube ... but, one thing at a time ...

Starting with level 1 the environment is a dark and rather neglected graveyard, where the dead sleep peacefully ... at least until the player turns up and annoys the hell out of them all (DEEPEST LORE).

And here is a rather long video of the whole thing in action, save for the obviously missing parts of an actual player character and level boss, both of which are currently still placeholder cubes.

But now that we are actually into level design, I am moving quite fast and this month have managed to produce a whole 3 finalised levels.

Behold level 2, The Primordial Forest at dawn, home to ancient plants and even more ancient and decidedly angry velociraptors ... so angry some of them shoot fricken laser beams out of their fricken heads.

And here's a slightly shorter 7 minute video of the level in action. I noticed afterwards that my dinosaurs where not exploding properly and should have been throwing more splatters about. However I had a wrongly named datablock and so the extra gore was not showing up. This has since been fixed.

And finally we have level 3; which I based loosely off pictures of Wulingyuan canyon in China, where the canyon has steep sides of light coloured rock with darker, green vegetation hanging on to every conceivable flat area.

And here is a slightly more reasonable 2 and a half minutes of game play.

In the more cramped confines of the canyon level, I noticed that the enemy spawning often grouped up together at one end of the screen. To create a more even distribution of enemy starting points, I wrote a little algorithm to target the player with the least nearby enemies and then find which cardinal direction (north, east, south, west) had the least enemies and spawn new ones there. This helps to prevent the enemy all starting to one side of the player and spreads the distribution of new enemies out more evenly.

So, their we go. Indie game development is painfully slow, especially for the One Man Army, but once ready to start on creating the actual environments, I have managed to complete 3 levels in one month. That's 30% of the levels done.

Next up, more environments to complete before seeing about replacing the placeholder cubes of the player and boss characters.