Week 6 Project Report

Black Ice games had several jobs that needed to be done this week.

Overview

-Black Ice Games changed from using XNA to using Stencyl.
-Build Tutorial Levels- including character movement, switches, doors, scene changes, and blocks.
-Design basic art to import into the game
-Design prototypes for puzzles
-Work on figuring out how light mechanic will work.

Reason for Switch
Black Ice Games recently decided to switch to Stencly instead of using XNA.  The goal of Black Ice Games is to create a well designed and fun to play puzzle-platformer.  XNA was found to be a little to difficult and time consuming to use for this purpose, and with the time constraints that are driving the development, a faster method was needed.  Stencly allows Black Ice Games to step into the development of the game faster.  This will allow for an overall better designed game during the time given.


Tutorial Level

Figure 4-4: Concept of Tutorial Level

Above, in figure 4-4, is the tutorial level that was being designed to test some basic functions.  Doors and switches were created, and debugged for this level.  This level contains a very basic puzzle, that involves the player pushing two switches in order to open the door.  This was not only the basis of the tutorial level but a test of the new Stencyl program.  Figuring out how to use this new program for a simple task helped to understand the program as a whole.  The final important part of this test was finding out how to switch the stages of the game.  It would be difficult to debug a large single staged game so the ability to have many stages that are easily connected is very helpful.


Art

The character animations for the idle stance is finished. For the movement, a simply code of adding slight rotation will give it more of an illusion of movement. The texture/tileset of the stage will resemble the same art style of "Limbo". Art is being develop in Flash.

Puzzles

Figures 4-1, 4-2, and 4-3 are all concepts and initial designs of puzzles to be implemented in the game.

Figure 4-1: Design of intro stage involving movement and elevators.

Figure 4-2: Rough concept of very first stage.

Figure 4-3: Rough design of first or second stage involving the light.

Mechanic

A key mechanic in the game is to allow the player to use a light that will reveal hidden objects. So in the implementation of this idea the light actor has to follow the position of the mouse. So far it partially works. The main issue right now is that the light doesn't completely follow the mouse as the screen scrolls. In the image below it can be seen where the position of the light is compared to the actual position of the mouse.

The switch mechanic uses values as boolean in order to activate various object when the character is within range and presses the action button.

The door is an actor that has a colliding surface when active and a non colliding surface when inactive.

Elevators push a player up or slowly lower the player down when active.