Once again I haven't had much to say for ages here, partly because of working on a large new feature at work and being a little too preoccupied with it to come up with any interesting commentary. But at home, I seem to have entered another game-making phase and Crystal Towers 2 is once again looking like it might be completed at some point within my lifetime, with an actual level tree now drawn out and some real progress being made for once.
Polishing up my existing levels and getting them up to a presentable level, as well as finishing off the last bits of the underlying engine (as I have been doing for the last two years) will be an ongoing project that I'll pick at in between creating actual new levels - when I actually lay them out I'm fairly energized by how far the game's actually come since it was started, after continuous rewrites and reworks. Over the last couple of days I've been working on the progress-keeping and online submission feature...
Squishing the online options as well as the summary of how far you've got in the game into the already crowded pause menu was proving to a problem, one I avoided by just giving a summary on the pause menu and moving the online submission out to be accessible via little computers distributed around the hub map.
(Try to ignore the mismatched colours. I don't think they've finished painting the place yet.)
When you use a computer, you get some unsurprising options - upload your progress summary to a page online (this works, but the actual display page is nothing to speak of at the moment) or view the scorecard. Those little 0s and 1s scroll along behind the menu, you know. I can also see, now that I look at it, that that tutorial text at the bottom could probably be revised to make it a bit more helpful.
Behind the scenes, the scorecard is a twisted nightmare of looping through various aspects of the save file for each level in turn, checking if the player has ever entered it, and if so adding its name and details to the list - shown here are the number of orbs/gems collected from a level and the other rewards you've picked up from it.
The medal is something I've just added tonight - finally there's a point to the gems in a level, because finishing with over 100 of them will reward you with one of these. They don't add much to your progress score, but they're another objective nonetheless. Thankfully the model that I'd chosen (or rather, that grew entirely organically with very little input from me) worked out well here - where all levels start in one introduction frame, redirect to whatever level has been pointed at, and then come out at the summary screen with no need to know about the level that's been played apart from its name - because all that was needed was to check for the gem counter being over 100 on that single summary page. I was thinking of doing an elaborate minigame sequence that you'd have to go through after getting the hundred to actually be awarded anything, but honestly I have enough problems at the moment.
After that, there are four possible rewards you can get from each level (and you don't want to know the insane lookups that I have to do to work out which ones the player has got from any particular one), which can be new spells, keys, recipes, bottles that boost your maximum health or magic points, or synth items lying around. I honestly couldn't think of any icon to signify that last possibility, resulting in the odd orange diamond that you see up there, but at least it looks reasonable. And I'm actually not sure how well the faded versions of the items you haven't collected work - being colourblind, it's possible that they're a lot less subtle than I think.
If you've completed every possible objective on a level, collected all the rewards and completed it with over 100 gems once, you get a nice little tick on the right. The next step (for this whole section) is going to be making the score page on the site resemble all this, or at least get it presentable.
And that's the process of submitting your score card. The game has fifteen levels and four bosses at the moment, a grand total of three out of which are actually finished to the point where I won't have to go back and touch them again. But the ease of adding things like this does signify that ploughing ahead is getting easier all the time, if I have the drive to do so.
Polishing up my existing levels and getting them up to a presentable level, as well as finishing off the last bits of the underlying engine (as I have been doing for the last two years) will be an ongoing project that I'll pick at in between creating actual new levels - when I actually lay them out I'm fairly energized by how far the game's actually come since it was started, after continuous rewrites and reworks. Over the last couple of days I've been working on the progress-keeping and online submission feature...
(Try to ignore the mismatched colours. I don't think they've finished painting the place yet.)
The medal is something I've just added tonight - finally there's a point to the gems in a level, because finishing with over 100 of them will reward you with one of these. They don't add much to your progress score, but they're another objective nonetheless. Thankfully the model that I'd chosen (or rather, that grew entirely organically with very little input from me) worked out well here - where all levels start in one introduction frame, redirect to whatever level has been pointed at, and then come out at the summary screen with no need to know about the level that's been played apart from its name - because all that was needed was to check for the gem counter being over 100 on that single summary page. I was thinking of doing an elaborate minigame sequence that you'd have to go through after getting the hundred to actually be awarded anything, but honestly I have enough problems at the moment.
After that, there are four possible rewards you can get from each level (and you don't want to know the insane lookups that I have to do to work out which ones the player has got from any particular one), which can be new spells, keys, recipes, bottles that boost your maximum health or magic points, or synth items lying around. I honestly couldn't think of any icon to signify that last possibility, resulting in the odd orange diamond that you see up there, but at least it looks reasonable. And I'm actually not sure how well the faded versions of the items you haven't collected work - being colourblind, it's possible that they're a lot less subtle than I think.
If you've completed every possible objective on a level, collected all the rewards and completed it with over 100 gems once, you get a nice little tick on the right. The next step (for this whole section) is going to be making the score page on the site resemble all this, or at least get it presentable.
