Playtesting and rearranging

Last night I finished a big section of the RoboNinja world map, and so I decided this was a good time to do some serious playtesting. I loaded up the game onto my phone and got to work. (at which point I noticed that my free trial of my vm hosting where I had my jenkins server had expired, so I need to figure out a replacement. I need to find something that can do Android builds, a place to push and host binaries, and all that without spending much money!)

It took me around 30 minutes to play through all the content that I currently have. Most of it worked fairly well, and played like I expected. There were a few spots where somehow the phone played just differently enough so that it was harder on the phone than it was on the desktop version, which will need to be fixed. (At one point in particular, I kept respawning inside a wall, which never happened before on that map).

The biggest thing that I realized had to do with the section of maps that I just finished. It's a rather long excursion that leads fairly linearly to a single item. You play through a bunch of moderately difficult maps, to be rewarded with the wall jump item (which lets you jump upwards off walls). Unfortunately, this is a bit underwhelming. It seems cool, but doesn't really change the way you play the game all that much. Compared with the double-jump item (where you can do another jump mid-jump) that you find a few screens earlier, which completely changes everything.

So I decided it was time to swap them. Which meant I needed to play through that part of the world again, to make sure that the challenge/balance was right (and actually possible) without having to get one before the other. (Turns out, no. There was one place where you had to have the double-jump or slam item to be able to make a jump. So that needs to be fixed).

So now they are all swapped around. And the first half of the game world is complete. We're getting there!