Welcome to another edition of Neon Orbis Devlog. Since the last edition of Neon Orbis Devlog, I have made quite a bit of progress with Fling D’Block, taking it from a rough prototype and into the Alpha Development Stage.
So what has changed? Well, the biggest change is the control scheme. Originally the block would be controlled by dragging a trajectory line by clicking and holding the mouse button and when releasing the block would propel itself into the air generally following the line previously set.
This worked well and provided a more strategic feel as you were looking for the best route to take to goal while predicting where your block would land and come to rest taking into account how bouncy your block is and how the collisions affected your flight. The drawback to this approach was that the game felt slower than I wanted it to. So I changed the controls to pulling back on the block, similar to a catapult, enabling you to control how much force and the direction of the force will be exterted onto the block. Also, that you can keep adding force while the block is in motion, unlike the previous control scheme that required you to wait before the block came to rest. Moving over to this control scheme added a lot of life to the game, making it feel more responsive, making the gameplay feel faster and moving from a predictive to responsive feel. Also it allows for more exciting course designs to be created due to now being able to keep your block in roughly the same position by constantly adding small amount of force directly underneath. Just like you would in flappy bird.
The big change was the level progress. Initially the player would start at level 1 and then work they way through the levels completing them one after the other. However, I have decided to allow the player to choose which level they would like to play, and in the order they would like to play it. At the start of the game, there would be a few levels available to playing through the game will unlock levels. This would be done by getting either a Gold, Silver and Bronze award. These awards are obtained by completing the level within a certain amount of time. Depending on how quickly the level was created would depend on which award you would be given. To make this all work, I have now created a level select screen and decided to split the level difficulties into worlds. Each world will have 8 levels and on launch there will be 3 worlds. So a total of 24 levels. In the future I will be adding additional worlds/levels and there is a big demand maybe adding a level editor with the ability to share levels.
Following this I have also added a few dangerous obstacles, spikes, death wheels and pendulums. If a player touches any of these, they die and the level restarts. Lives are infinite. The aim of the game is to get the fastest time, not to try and stay alive as long as possible. So dying may possbily ruin your fastest run, but won’t cause you to have restart the entire game or to play safe.
Until next time, have fun with whatever game you’re playing!