This week I’ve been mostly experimenting with the core gameplay, which is what makes a game fun. I changed how the non-controller characters now follow your movement, they are now just “ghost” images of your old locations. In the previous builds I had them move from their spot to your last known location, which looked great but was also buggy when I started experimenting with different movement speeds for each character. I don’t like messy elements like that, especially if they aren’t needed for the gameplay. So I ended up with an easier, faster and cleaner method of having the other characters follow you.
One of the big things I want to improve over the original is the quests stuff. In HoL1 the quests were mostly “if you happen to do this in the right time, you can get something, if not.. that’s fine! you decide”. It worked nice, keeping the game fast and casual, but for the sequel I want the quests to get a bigger focus.
So right now I made the level generator also generate quests. So a “locked door” can basically be anything at this point. In the video you can see there’s an avatar in front of one of those locked doors, telling me a Rocko stole the key.. so the locked door has now become a silly, but required, quest.
This system can be extended to various quests like “pay me X coins” or “this door is magically locked -> find a way to open it” and then you need to find a room with some statues or pressure-plates or a magical item.. basically anything goes!
Finally I also started looking into how I want to handle the health and experience stuff. Current build I gave every character their own experience level, and you can fill those bars by killing or breaking stuff with that specific character. Meanwhile the health bar is your groups-health bar, so I might have to split those up visually or go in a different direction.
If I would also make the health-bar character specific, another set of problems comes up: what if a character dies, can you still complete a level/all quests? or would you end up with 1 character, and no way to open a magical or extra strong door.
So there’s that! Lot’s of stuff to figure out, and see what works, which is mostly just trying it out and playing the game a lot of times to see where the fun comes in.
