I’ve been working on a pushing mechanism this week, it’s a fairly simple challenge gameplay wise, but it breaks the action a bit and it’s a fun little quest to open doors and continue on your path.
The pushing part of it was pretty easy to add, however there are some gameplay problems that happen once you start thinking about it. Once you push the statue in front of a wall you can’t really get it back from there since you can’t get behind the statue. This becomes a serious problem if you push it against a closed door, and thus blocking your only path.
Various solutions are possible, I could implement a pull-mechanism so that you can simply pull the statue back from the wall or door. Another solution would be to limit where the player can push the statue, this would require some pre-calculation work when creating the level, and then placing hidden markers that make sure the player never gets stuck moving the objects. And finally I could just make the objects smash-able and magically re-appear on their original spot.
The pulling solution would be fun, but I don’t like complicated controller schemes, so I would have to maybe “glue” the object to the player once you bump into it. Then again, bumping into it by accident would suddenly have you move objects all over the place. Possible solution tho, with some timers in there the accidental-glue problem can be solved, so I’ll dig into this some more.
The second solution, I tried this one, requires a lot of work and is buggy and problematic! With the level being procedurally, but randomly, generated, you could have all sorts of issues with solid scenery stuff blocking pathway’s or items and monsters changing the whole room area.. messy, and not going that route for sure.
The third solution, is the easiest and also the sloppiest solution. And it’s what I implemented at the moment ! Simply smash the statue and a second or two later it re-appears. I will try the pulling idea I have first, but for now this works good enough for me to continue working on various other stuff.
Having this push mechanism working it was fairly easy to turn it into a quest with a switch needing a heavy object to open a door (thanks to the flexible quest system I created last week).
I also re-introduced an old favorite monster form the previous game: the bats! Their movement and attack pattern are updated and improved, but they are back in action.
For every old monster I also aim to create a newer challenge, so I added the “monster spawners” that I had originally planned for the first game but removed them from that one because of level logistics and they would simply not work well within the gameplay. This time that’s different and I can even link these spawners to a quest (destroy the spawner to open the door.. see where I’m going with quests here?)
Okay, that’s this week’s update, back to work!
