Devlog: Godot Game - The Back Third of Level 3-1

Working on Blogging Tool was a nice little break but I’m back on my Godot game. I’m trying to get the layout of level 3-1 finished. I’m actually not very happy with the back 60% of this. For you see, world 3 is meant to be a mountainous world, with more pits and more vertical levels. Much of this is to be seen in 3-2, with 3-1 being merely the foothills of the range the player is expected to climb. And part of this is that this level was originally the second one, but some players I shared this with said the difficulty curve ramped up a little too much. So I’ve moved it in world 3. making it the 5th level of the game.

So the first part of the level sort of double backs on itself as the player is to negotiate some pretty careful jumping with moving platforms and enemies:

This is largely untouched from when this was the second level. It’s a little clunky — mainly due to some of the platforms being mistimed — but it works. This then extends to the second part, which is more linear and traditional:

It’s this part I’m not happy with. For one thing, it’s not challenging enough. Not that it has to be super challenging, but the pacing just sort of peters out here. It’s also on the smaller size, especially compare to world 2 and their significantly longer levels.

But I think I have an idea. The relatively flat section, featuring a bridge and a bit of dodging of balloons, I think I’ll keep. But for the third part, I think I’ll bring back the double backing jumping challenge, and finish it off with a lift ride. My theory is that the flat section will act as a nice palate cleanser to break up the other two “acts” of the level, along with reintroducing the floating balloons with mines. Act three will mirror act one, in the precision jumping while giving the sense of ascending difficult terrain. The lift at the end will also add to this which also giving a sense of accomplishment.

So that’s a lot of words I’ve picked up from YouTube videos about game design. Let’s see if I can execute on this. I’ll start with a pit, designed to to be an allusion to the pit at the start. I wish I can draw convincing organic terrain: it never looks right. Although the pit at the start has straight walls, so maybe this one should too.

Okay, so tried to draw some floating land masses that the player will need to navigate. Gave it a quick test, and nothing disastrous so far. The player should be able to see where they need to go while they’re traversing the horizontal parts. Verticals are another story, but the path should be easy to follow once platforms are added.

Have jumped around this area a few times and I think this may work. It makes for a more interesting area, and I can see where hazards and platforms would go. Tried it from the start and yeah, I like it. I think I’ll go with this.