Expanding on the Level

As I believe that I mentioned previously, I started with a written draft, a rough outline of the canonical events of the level. (And in doing so, I discovered things in the level that I hadn't known of before--for example, there's a small tale of murder to be found amongst the mummies in the tomb.)

The intention was--and is--to expand on this, building additional gameplay challenges for the player. And indeed, ideas towards this started to come to me even as I wrote out the draft.

With the draft done, I moved on to building a prototype, a simple version of the level that could easily be changed or extended. There's nothing fancy here, aside from one or two elements that had been previously created (perhaps most notable being the mummy enemies).

Right now I'm focussing primarily on the critical path through the level: the sequence of events involved in getting from the start to the end, excluding side-elements like collectables or optional reading. The elements of this path aren't yet final, but I think that I'm making progress.

One reason for this focus is that I want to determine roughly how long the critical path takes to play (given a player familiar with the path). I'm hoping for it to come to about fifteen minutes (or longer!)--if it's much shorter than that, I might add another layer to the tomb. A Door to the Mists is intended to be a somewhat short game, but I don't want it to be too short...


Curtains. Useful for hiding things behind... ;)

A point that might be of interest is that there is now intended to be an early, optional ending available during this level: In a particular tomb, the player finds and acquires the book for which they have been sent. Its owner, however, objects. To continue, the player fights this mummy, then leaves with the book in hand. However, the player also has the option to return the book to the shelf on which they found it, and leave unharmed--and empty-handed.

Conversely, one option has been removed: I had originally intended that the player be able to bypass one of the fights by pre-emptively killing one of the mummies in its sarcophagus (and indeed, I had this implemented).

However, I realised that this was somewhat out of character for the protagonist (especially given an objection that she can make to a similar possibility later in the level), and would also, for the sake of consistency, call for the second combat encounter to be similarly skippable. (It also turns out that using a sword to kill a mummy in a stone sarcophagus might be somewhat awkward, and dangerous.) The player can still attempt to use their sword on the mummy, but doing so now results in the character objecting instead

I recall that I had a minor fright while building the level: two features that I had thought functional--the player-light and object-carrying--weren't working as expected. In the former, shadows weren't cast properly, and objects weren't lit as expected; in the latter, I could pick up objects and put them down, but the object's model remained behind while it was being "carried". Both of these I expected to work.

And both did.

The problem, in short, was that I had initially built the level without the elements related to portal-culling, and both features were affected by it.

I went back to the level and added in those various elements--a slightly tedious job, but nothing too troublesome.

And with that, both features worked again! :D

The placement of the portals is somewhat slapdash right now, but that's okay for this early stage, I feel.

In addition to the above, a variety of bugs were discovered and fixed, and miscellaneous changes made; for the most part too numerous and too small to be worth listing in this post, I feel. As I said, a somewhat busy week! ^_^

That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^