Archive:
Every Wand Charge in the level was respawning when the player died, which, er, isn’t right. You shouldn’t see anything in the rooms you’re not in. So I fixed that: they ask their Room Controller if the room is active before spawning.
I’ve put placeholder rooms in for The Wine Cellar, and The Abbey (Willy’s Mansion), so you’re able to walk through the entire bottom loop without getting stuck. I might not get to finish these before my August milestone, and I don’t want blockers in my build…
Ok, back to Moonbase for a bit.
I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with designing puzzles, so I veered away from them (for the most part) in the first game. For my money, skill progresses as you play, but if you have a brain-fart with a puzzle, you’re screwed. And yeah, I get that I live in the future; puzzles can be solved via the internet, but I’m lazy, and I don’t like that feeling when I have to look it up. So, Lumo was “puzzle lite”, if you’re being generous.
The other, more serious problem, is that most of the time puzzles are entirely bespoke. Custom assets, custom code. Which makes them time-consuming / low bang-for buck. But UE’s a much better environment, and my toolbox is bigger, so I want to get a few in. I’m going to make sure most of them are off the golden path. Maybe a requirement to find the Boomboxes?
Willy’s Mansion is, so far, entirely platforming and pastiches. There’s only one “puzzle”, in The Attic, to get up to The Roof, so I'll keep it that way. Moonbase, on the other hand, is a bit riper for it. I’m already playing around with electricity, I could enable robots, and play around with things like laser beams, and black holes.
But the first thing to do is make sure there’s something for the player to discover when they enter it for the second time. A little bit of remodelling later:
This is going to lead to a short path of rooms that links back up to “Four Way Hub”, one of the few empty rooms in the game. You originally passed through it to get to the Impossible Mission section, and it already had a "secret" door, hidden in the wall that you couldn’t see. Even better, it’s next door to the first Love Box, and I’d already set that room up as somewhere you’d need to return to, once you had the double jump… Hurrah!
So yeah. You don’t have to solve every design problem straight away. You can leave the threads of plans and ideas lying about for later. They often tie together the more you play the thing, and the more you build. Or at least, that’s my excuse for doing very little up-front. :D
So, first puzzley room:
I’ve laid the room out, built the floor lights, and created a new type of Twiddler. This one holds an array of actors – the floor lights – that map directly to a bitfield. As the lights go on and off, they flip the appropriate bit, and I can check an entire row of lights against the row of pixels shown on the TV. Simple.
Finished the room off. You match the picture, the next TV comes on, until you eventually unlock the door. To make it really obvious, I’ve added chevrons to the wall, and a much bigger door lock indicator to the wall. I wanted to use the shield particle effect, but I can’t easily fade it in and out as the walls rotate, so had to bin it. Bloody annoying.
Audio is missing, and the room doesn’t record that you’ve unlocked it, so atm every time you go in there you need to go through the entire thing again, which is not cool. I’ll sort that out tomorrow.
Oh, and I made it so the floor points at the exit, once you’re done.
In the first game, there was a moving platform that moved in the direction the player was facing. I only used it a couple of times, so I thought I’d bring it back. I’ve made a couple of improvements: it has directional lights, to make the mechanic a bit more obvious, and it’s bigger, so you can move around without falling off. The one in the first game was tiny.
Oh, and I’ve added a quality of life improvement. When you press both shoulder buttons, the camera resets to the nearest 45 deg rotation, rather than “Lumo Default”. This is soooo much nicer.
Made a new room to introduce the platform. You have to guide it through some energy barriers to collect paint.
The barriers at the ends of the room have collision at the bottom, which will automatically stop the platform, but the area in the middle doesn’t, so you might fry yourself accidentally. I quite like the way the barriers fade in and out as you enter the room, but it took me hours to settle on a look that I was happy with. The plasma on the walls of the room is pretty cool, though. That was worth the effort.
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