4.24.2005
The progress and more design issues
Levels
There's been something that I have been thinking of for quite a while, that I didn't want to trouble us with, considering our slow initial progress. In a lot of games that I have played, I remember that one of the best things was the interactivity with the levels. Climbing, stepping, bouncing, etc. Level design is of high priority for us, and with the advancement of our level code, I'd say we're ready for something nice. We have to consider that levels are a world themselves. They are alive. They are not static. This being said, I asked Will if there's an easy way in which, given the current level code, we can add moving parts to levels. The response: yes. Awesome. For the final version, look forward to waving flags, moving windmills in the ninja town (i hope), and other animations.
Enemies
Given a game of our scope, how do we create various enemies that could add a nice dimension to the game? It is quite a difficult question to answer. But we decided from the begining that the way our enemies will stand out is not their dramatic visual difference, but their AI. The enemies, are in essence, the same as our characters. However, each type specializes in a different skill. Pirates and Nnjas. There's aggresive pirates and ninjas. There's defensive pirates and ninjas. There's suicidal pirates and ninjas. Visually, we used the Adobe Photoshop suite and ran our character images through some filters. That has resulted in some pretty interesting images, which I think we could still work on. But overall, I'm very satisfied with them.
