Roots
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A few things came up during last Mondays play testing of our game Mole Munch. Several testers remarked that they wanted to be able to see where the vegetables, located above ground, were when digging under ground. It is also note worthy that no one was able to complete the game so we had to think of ways to make it easier for the players. Having previously only briefly discussed implementing vegetable roots to make it easier to find the vegetables this convinced us to at least give it a try. So I made roots so that we could keep our options open. Just like previous sprites these needed to be viewed looking straight down at them. The smaller roots are limited to 32×32 pixels, same as the smaller fruits and vegetables, and the melon roots must have the same size or smaller than the melon, which is 64×64 pixels.
The limited resolution didn´t hurt these sprites as much as others because they are not meant to attract too much attention, just give a little extra information to the player, so they will make do without much detail. This helps the roots blend into the background when a player is not actively looking for them.The exception is the melon root. Another decision made to make the game easier was changing the win condition from collecting all vegetables to just needing to collect the melons and just awarding a higher score for also collecting the other fruit and vegetables. To make it even easier for whomever just wants to complete the level I decided on adding a gold shimmer animation when making the melon root. This was easy to accomplish, I just drew a yellow layer on top of it and adjusted the opacity of it one percent at a time to get frames for the animation. It´s still not certain if the roots will be needed. A speed boost when picking up vegetables has been added that in addition to making the game easier removes the boring grind of slowly plowing through large fields of vegetables. This also make it possible to outrun the gardener when in a field of vegetables. Together with only needing to pick up the melons that might be enough to make the game easier to a sufficient degree. Ether way hopefully people not involved in making the game will also be able to complete it with these latest changes.  |
