Home : Game Development : The Ball
(That's not the final name, just a working placeholder)
I've just finished with the second level, or at least the second level of the "platformer" iteration of the game. The platforming is much faster paced than the first level, and I'm hoping to keep that energy going, having subsequent levels achieve faster and faster top speed while making the platforming a lot trickier. I've also finally added the wall jump counter to the HUD (crudely), and increased the wall jump strength. It may be a *little* strong now, but that's totally intentional, and it'll blend in better in later levels.
One thing I had forgotten in the long time since developing older features was how tough level design was. I'm relatively happy with the final product, and I'm hoping that spamming decorations and changing the shape of the rooms slightly will improve things in the future, the levels are going to look boring, at least for now. Gameplay wise, the general style gives me a decent template for future levels. A short wandering section for dialogue to occur, then the main parkour section of the level, and finally the final room with that big door and whatnot.
There was also a scare this morning when I realized that KadenElex had all of his music removed from YouTube and Spotify due to a publishing error or something. Whoops. Either way, I was able to get my copy of the originals for the purposes of game development. There is the issue of there being 13 tracks in the game, and only 10 "levels" (individual scenes where a different track is played) planned. I mean, I'll come up with 3 additional levels somewhere, but the script, as far as the actual substance of the story, has been locked in for years, so I don't much feel like making big modifications.
Although this is the first time I'm uploading any documentation around development, the game has been in "alpha" since 2023 or 2024 I think (I lost the original files multiple times). So I'm going to do a quick overview of everything that's happened since beginning work on the project!
Here's the rough timeline of development so far. Kaden came to me first with the pitch for the game, and I gladly took up the project, especially since the story, which came to him in a fever dream, was awesome. He created the first batch of music around the same time, and so I had the basics for what I needed to develop as a start. The first thing was the general movement of the ball. At this time the game was 3rd person, and didn't have any platforming, as it was intended as a puzzle dungeon crawl type game. I made a material shader for this part to allow you to see the ball through solid walls that it was hidden behind. This version didn't last very long however, as it didn't convey the sense of being trapped, and wasn't condusive to an oppressive atmosphere. So I transfered the camera into the ball, made it work with the movement to actually cause the ball to roll in the direction you're looking (this took a couple days since I didn't fully understand the trig), and adapted the 'see through walls' shader to a crisp window shaped window so you could actually see out of the ball .
The next, obviously most important part, was getting the sound engine working so I could play those wonderful songs from the OST that Kaden made. Many years ago I coppied the sound effect and music player from a tutorial by Brackeys, and had tweaked it and added features over said years. The only things that needed to be upgraded for this game were the ability to set which kind of Unity audio object to use when calling the sound, and building in scene music directly to the audio manager so that level changes and level resets both had different rules for what to do with the music. The last thing I needed, as this was a puzzle game, was to make a puzzle engine. I settled on starting with light panel puzzles, where I could specify the configuration of all of the light panels as a logic gate array, and set an output based on whether the plates were on or off in the correct order. I then just had to make a massive blast door model which has it's opening animation triggered by the output bit of the puzzle system being set to true. It was at this point that I threw all of this together into a basic maze level, threw on some random concrete textures, and put it together into a quick demo. I was happy with the development progress up until this point, Kaden was as well, and he agreed to move forward with the project, completing the second half of the music.
This was the source of the first major setback, as I managed to completely erase the development environment. Whoops. This was before I had the project on version control, and before any backup server, so I couldn't rollback the massive deletions. Whoops. Luckily, I still had an old copy of the development environment from right after I finished the first person movement from way earlier in this wall of text. Yay! Either way, that renders the previous paragraph almost entirely pointless, or at least it would if I didn't just redo all of that progress manually by, you know, writing all the code again, just cleaner and with fewer bugs this time.
It is worth noting at this point that the game is developed in Unity, and while as of now I mostly use Godot for my newer projects, I didn't want to rewrite the whole game this far in. FOSS FTW.
This soft reset of the project did however give me a moment to reconsider the ideas I had for the game, and reconsider the actual gameplay. Believe it or not, clunky movement in a maze in a hamster ball wasn't particularly fun, especially since there was no actual hamster involved. This is when I reworked the movement system to inlcude wall jumping, and added a "boost pad" which just shoots the ball in the direction the pad is facing. I also redid the demo level set completely to have short exploration sections separated by platforming sections which provide the actual substance of the gameplay. This is where I got the idea to make the platforming be faster paced, increasing the jump strength and speed, so gaining momentum is encouraged. This made the game slightly more fun.
That leaves the game in the state it's currently in, and I'm hoping to have a 3 level demo become available to public download at some point in the near future, that is with story elements removed, because spoilers. The next step is to fine tune the movement physics, polish the user interface a bit, and work on the dialogue system.
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