Day 4

Today I wasn't able to put in as many hours as the other days, but despite that it was fairly productive. A good 1/4th of that time was spent collecting and ordering my thoughts on how to most efficiently move forward, 1/2 of the time was spent on adding and working with the new gimmick, and the rest of the time I spent fixing a couple bugs with the level loader. Aside from a minor success with the gimmicks I'm working on (as seen in the attached video), the most interesting discoveries were made during the time that I spent preparing for the work itself.

Progress today:

• Basic threats and the player's death state
• Added upward velocity when jumping off the wheel
• Proved that the death-area wheel in-out design works (to an extent)
• Added a level loader (and the possibility to press 'R' to restart in turn)

Sharpening the axe:

I made the base gimmick of the game: The wheel. But, where to go next? My production-point inspired approach says that I should still be in the exploration phase at this point - and I agree. The wheel needs a lot more work before it truly becomes a fun gimmick to play around with. Therefore, I think I should continue polishing the wheel. But how? After jogging the noggin, I concluded that a good approach would be to simply create the different scenarios I imagine that the player would encounter on the wheel - in other words, the direct companion gimmicks to the wheel. That way I get to make content for the game, while tweaking the main gameplay mechanic to feel better, and testing it further. If all goes well I score on most/some of my scenario-ideas and they can be used for the final demo.

Now, this is starting to sound an awful lot like the exploitation phase, not exploration phase (prototyping vs. production). And to a certain degree it is. But, I couldn't come up with any other way that would let me run experiments on the base gimmick more effectively. I think that depending on the game that you're making, the transition from the exploitation to the exploration phase might end up looking more like a gradient than black and white. And for this game the gimmick's companion gimmicks / scenarios are content. Although, that doesn't mean I wont reach a concrete point where I say "this is the end of exploration, and the beginning of exploitation". In fact, I have split the soon-to-be-tackled work items into three categories based on exploration and exploitation.

1. Mostly exploration: The wheel itself, and gimmicks that directly relate to it (such as leaving the track, or the player's down-dash)
2. 50 / 50 split: The curse that chases the player up the mountain, potential enemies, and other gimmick that aren't directly related to the wheel
3. Mostly exploitation: Generation / making a level, start and end

And most of the work is looking to be in the 'mostly exploration' category. Which is why I think that it's likely that I'll spend an additional day on exploration-type work, and only a single day on exploitation-type work, in order to get the game in a working state for an alpha test.

Etc.

It is getting late again, and my effectiveness depends on amount of sleep I get. So I'm calling it here for today. There's still a lot I want to write about and I hope to manage finishing work earlier to make time for it. I realize that future projects that have a bigger scope than this would actually require me to finish up work at reasonable hours to not burn out. That will definitely be a goal for the future.

As always, source code can be found on the github and the mega drive.

Cya on day 5.