Big Game Project: Defunct: Week 6

I finally got around to the tutorial level. Planning and building it structurally took almost all week. Since the beginning of the project, I always imagined the tutorial level to be very open, only containing a few hills that you had to go up and over. The different features would be explained and performed between the hills, if you didn’t learn the feature; you wouldn’t get over the hill.

There are two problems with this. One is that you gain a lot of speed with each feature, so eventually you will have enough speed to fly through each section without having to learn them. That is unless you have gigantic levels that allow you to loose speed until you reach the next feature.

The second problem is that we don’t have time to decorate gigantic levels by now. We will only have time to decorate a small closed off levels.

So I have tailored each section of the tutorial to its feature. When you learn how to turn – you have some rocks to go around. When you learn how to make yourself heavier – there are some hills to pump in and so on.

Making sure that players know how to play was extremely important this time around. So to make sure that players do it right; we pause the game and check if they are holding down the right buttons, when they do, the game continues. Personally, I think that this is holding the players hand a little too hard. I fear that players won’t remember what they learned because they didn’t figure it out themselves; they are rather forced to do it. But like mentioned, time is short and we don’t have time to design it any other way right now.

What is left now is simply to texture and decorate it. For the time being, I will work on finishing my other level, placing collisions and decorating.