This week continues the process from last week; taking all the 25 level drawings for world 3, cutting them up and placing them in a preliminary order ready for the game.
As world 3, like the world before it, adds in new game play elements the difficulty is momentarily reduced to explain the new features; laser fences and one-way barriers. After the first 2 or 3 levels though the difficulty will spike back to where it should be for the mid-game content.
As it stands at the moment I have added in the first 5 levels from world 3 and they I’ve tested the first 3. The first 2 required new tutorial sequences so those have also been created and added to the game.
The tutorials may all get re-done at some point as I’m wondering if it would be more efficient to use a video player and have the tutorials as mp4 files rather than importing them as animated gifs which use up a lot of texture groups with frames (some tutorials have 70+ frames). I need to get an extension for video playback before I can make this call.
During the building of these new levels I realised I would need to sort out something I noticed that would happen while drawing the levels. The laser fences are set up so that they automatically form the lasers when the game runs, rather than me having to pace the lasers myself. There can be one small issue with this in that if you want to have to laser fences running parallel to each other but not connected you can’t. So, I have added in a special invisible block that the laser fence towers can detect and abort the creation of the lasers in that direction. Works well.