Sunday, January 26, 2014

Portable Checkpoint

It turns out I'm chattier when I'm more excited about the project. I'm still making progress, but was slogging through some code that was designed poorly, so it wasn't any fun. So I've been pretty quiet.

Fairly early on, I had decided a wanted a consumable "portable checkpoint" item that you drop right before a really hard section, so you wouldn't go crazy having to do a whole level over. Unfortunately, my item design had focused on the main character abilities, and didn't work well with consumable items. I finally slogged through that, when I realized that my checkpoint/respawn design also didn't work well with having a secondary respawn point.

So I ended up doing a ton of work, when I should have done significantly less if I had thought through my design better in the first place. 

The good thing is that I've been continuing to make progress on maps/levels in parallel. When I'm not in the mood to write code, I can turn off my brain and rough out a level map. Or use my brain and design the specific spike/jump/enemy patterns for that level.  Or if I'm sick of making levels, it's back to code.  So that works well.

So now I've got the portable checkpoint item working, along with a nice little icon. (Thanks Rob, for the icons!) And a couple more maps.

Now I need to actually properly test on my phone, which I haven't done in a few weeks. That always reveals new bugs that weren't obvious testing just on my computer. Not looking forward to that.

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