Working on some early level design

So I decided to put the actual programming on pause at this point, and do some early level-design. Mainly because I don't actually enjoy the details of level design very much. I really enjoy drawing a big rough map of the world, and planning out the overall gameplay. But the details of each little level? It's tedious.

Which is weird because when I was a kid that dreamed of making video games, I loved drawing out each level in minute detail on paper. Now that just bores me. Maybe because when you are 8 years old and drawing levels, you don't have to pay attention to making them the appropriate difficulty level, and interesting to look at, at the same time.

Anyway, so I've started on the first couple of "real" levels/rooms in the game. The first is pretty simple, without many things that can kill you. The second is full of death. And I'm realizing it's going to take a lot of work to make the challenge level right for this game. I'm not yet good enough at my own game to know which jumps and arrangements are going to be hard, and which are going to be easy, and which are just impossible to get through. There's one spot that I had to put in a checkpoint/save-point just for testing, so I could play it over and over again just to see if there was any way to get through it (yes, there is. It's not easy though).

So I've got a couple of possibly-finished levels (out of about 50). But that's why I started now. If I finished all the programming, and just had level design to do, I'd get so bored. So I need to pace myself: work on a few levels, then go back to coding. Work on some levels, then back to coding.

My current plan is to make the levels up until the first major ability item, then actually add the UI code for managing items. Then I need to write the code for the minimap. Which, I learned from Anguna, is a giant pain.  Hopefully I'll be smarter in how I write it this time around.

I also found yet another bug with my ramp code. Robo-Ninja can't jump while running down a ramp. Because I depend on the game's gravity to lower you down the ramp, it thinks you are in a freefall, so it won't let you jump. Oops.