Journal Entry 3

Date: 17.4.2023

Activity: Finishing Project B

Notes:

I've changed and fixed quite a number of things. Starting from the beginning: The player gets some info about the existence of hidden rooms - in my opinion this is fair since this is potentially the first level with hidden rooms that a player encounters. Next I edited the tile map a bit. Previously, there was a small bump on the right side of the wall. I left it there because I drew it in the initial level design but players got a bit confused and tried to use the platform to jump to the left side to the moving platform and that wasn't possible. That's why I got rid of it. Next when jumping on the moving platform that takes the player up in the spike area, I edited it a bit because some players tried to jump immediately to the box. This wouldn't be so bad but the problem was that only a few players managed that successfully and the rest fell down and had to wait for the platform to get back down. That's why I decided to change the terrain so that the players wouldn't feel like jumping up but rather stay on the platform and let it take them to the box. In this first area, I've incountered a problem involving moving platforms where Ellen would keep jumping even when player wouldn't press the jump key. It turned out that this could be fixed when I adjusted the speed of the moving platform, however it still happens from time to time on the platform that leads the player to the pushable box when it's going up. It's not a big problem since the player doesn't have to do anything beside staying on the platform in those moments but it's still worth mentioning.

In the second area, I've made the jumping pad more visible by changing its color to bright red and added a little dialogue window that makes the player try different things with the jumping pad. This dialogue window might not seems necessary but I felt like a couple of players got a bit confused and didn't find the pad to be that important so I wanted to fix that and wanted to draw their attention to it. The rest stayed basically unchanged.

The third area stayed the same.

The forth and the last area required a bit of tweaking as well. The biggest change is the big boss. Instead of small projectiles, it spits another chompers. This was suggested to me by another play-tester so the credit goes to the nameless student. Anyway, now it's a bit more challenging but I've also added some extra healing pads in the hidden room. I've also gotten rid of the moving platform and the spikes. First of all, the roof prevented the spitter from throwing the enemies in the player's direction since the ceiling was in the way. And except for that, the moving platform wasn't really doing it's purpuse. I wanted to make it so the player could hop on it and attack the spitter a bit while not being on the ground. But this didn't really turn out that way since the layout allowed the player to stay on the platform the whole time with made it basically OP. But by adding the spikes so that the player would jump down every once in a while, it would prevent the spitter from throwing the enemies in the player's direction... So I got rid of this feature entirely.

Some overall changes: I've tweaked the damage of the gun and of the melee attack. In the previous version of the game, the gun was way too OP - you could just keep shooting at the enemies from a distance and end up with full health whereas the melee attack wasn't so rewarding since getting too close to the enemies posed risk for the player. Now the damage of on bullet is 1 and the damage of a melle attack is 2. Every basic enemy has 2HP so that means either two bullets or 1 melee attack. Still the melee attack was not that worth it and kinda annoying for one reason - when the player does an attack, Ellen dashes forward. By doing that, she gets closer to the enemy and ends up being attacked instead of attacking. This felt so annoying and unsatisfying so I edited the script and made it so Ellen was invinsible while attacking. Of course, this would be a bit stupid in other games but the controls in Gamekit 2D are pretty limited (that means no block, parry etc.) and basically every melee attack ended up with Ellen getting hurt. Now the combat feels more satisfying and the weapons are more balanced in my opinion.

Finally, there was a problem with the "restart level" button when I pressed it (it put the player into position the origin (0,0,0)), so I fixed that as well as made it so the whole level restarts once the player dies - there are no checkpoints. I feel like my level isn't that difficult and although hidden, there are quite a lot of healing boxes, so I feel like it's quite forgiving.

Invested hours: 6 hours

Outcome: This final version of my game feels complete and I'm happy how it turned out!