Making a game

Hello everyone! This post isn’t a giveaway unfortunately, but I wanna talk about this game that I think I may make! The base of the game is just a platformer, 8 worlds and 4 levels within these worlds but here’s the thing… All four levels are the same level but flipped 90 degrees! So you may know how to get through a level one way, but it turns out in the next level everything is different because it’s just turned slightly! I’ll be making a few quick builds for Windows, macOS and Linux in the next coming days that you guys can play, I hope you guys enjoy them!

-:kiwi_fruit:

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That sounds like an interesting level designing challenge. I take it the first 90 turn will make the level something you have to scale from bottom and up? Platforms you previously climbed on the ‘long’ side you now have to use on their short and walls you had to get over are now wide platforms?

Level 180 would be traversing the ceiling and level 270 a free fall? Will there be fall damage making it a challenge to portion up the falling sections rather than just dropping all the way down in one go?

I wonder if it really is feasible to create a level that is not only possible but also enjoyable to traverse in all for directions. I’d be curious to try it out at any rate.

Good luck.

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I think I understand what you are making.

The only similar thing I can remember was Castlevania(right?) that flipped the entire game upside down when some conditions were met.

For a 2D platformer, doing 180 degrees is doable. I’m not sure how you will accomplish these 90 degree turns unless your game is a 3D platformer. Definitely make a prototype to see how far the concept will work.

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I feel like this is the type of game that if done right would make you verbally say “wow that’s kind of cool” and i’m exited to play it.

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I sign for the beta, alpha, pre alpha anything lol I love testing games it’s my fetish…

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I’ll be having some gravity aspect to the game, where all objects (keys, enemies, the player) besides the exit fall, this will solve most of the issues with impossibility of a level.

There won’t be any fall damage since, in my eyes at least, fall damage in a platformer is one of the worst things someone can do when they make a game.

As for your last statement, I completely agree with making a level that is both good and fun. I don’t really plan on having this game ever be “finished”. Does this mean that there won’t ever be a 1.0? No, but I plan on working on this more as a constant project :slight_smile:

-:kiwi_fruit:

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To be completely honest, I’ve never played Castlevania (though my friends pressure me to play it along with every other Nintendo game haha)

And it is going to be a 2D platformer, but turning the level 90 degrees is fairly easy as long as the levels are squared or rectangular (which they will be)

-:kiwi_fruit:

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You mentioned testing and stuff… I’d love to do maybe a private alpha then a public beta but I don’t really know how to set that stuff up since I’m just hosting all the files off my server lol

-:kiwi_fruit:

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I think itch.io provides such functionality but I’m not sure thou, so don’t quote me on that, I’ve just been looking around since I kinda wanna jump on the same boat as you.

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It’s notable that the level design was on point for SOTN, with platform spacing designed to ensure jumps between platforms worked when inverted. However, the game also changed pace once the castle was inverted to ensure players weren’t fatigued since they’d already gone through the map once and there was the risk of boredom. Whilst the first part of the game has a loose “sequence” you can more or less go straight to the end when you get to the second castle.

Repetition is the bane of gamers, and is why Odin Sphere (and for me Birth By Sleep) became tedious. Unless there are fundamental changes to gameplay or unique gimmicks reusing assets is something that needs to be done with care and attention.

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I’ve heard about itch.io, but to be honest if I’m going through with a closed beta and such I’ll be doing it all on my end. I prefer self hosting everything rather than relying on services for the sole fact that services can shut down or not let you use their services. Mainly just me being paranoid though haha!

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Services shut down and that’s why you don’t use them as your sole storage point. You don’t lose anything if they shut down that way :D You can still use them for the convenience of the people you work with.

In any case, it doesn’t sound like you’re anywhere near needing testers, you’ve still got a lot to think about re: level design. It’s challenging enough to design a fun platformer area without also making sure it works in 4 different ways without just sectioning off different parts of the map.

SotN is an interesting rare example of two-way level design, but I don’t think it’s a fantastic example overall. Some maps are done well and jumps work nicely (mostly these are the maps where it’s just 1-tile-thick platforms where it’s inevitable that jumps would work both ways), but a lot of the Inverted Castle is not like that, and it’s more about High-Jumping and Flying your way through. The maps that do work well don’t play significantly differently, and it’s the maps that don’t work very well that let you switch up how you navigate them. I think that’s something worth thinking about.

Although not actually similar to your idea, you may want to look into the maze needle subgenre of I Wanna Be The Guy fangames for inspiration. I’ve not seen any that employ level rotation, but some have level designs that are seemingly quite open, and the challenge is to find the correct path between all the platforms to the exit, with platforms that felt like an obstacle before becoming the path to the end later, or vice versa. I think this approach could lend itself to some very interesting levels, as the solutions for each rotation would be quite different, and the levels could be open enough that rotating the level wouldn’t leave you with just one obvious path to the end. If you need a starting place for your research into these games, try I wanna qoqoqo origin and the other games in the qoqoqo “series”.

Another not-entirely relevant game worth looking at is The Bridge, which is a puzzle game where you rotate the map while you navigate it. Although that’s very different from your goal, some of its levels do have areas that are navigated differently depending on which way they’re rotated, and might give you some ideas. The game also employs gravity as not only a way to keep levels solvable, but as part of its puzzles, as gravity works against you a lot of the time. (Incidentally, I actually rather dislike this game, in a large part because it spoils the perfectly good rotation mechanic with some additional mechanics that don’t work with it very intuitively.)

Earlier you mentioned doing square/rectangular levels. Don’t discount slopes or rounded shapes entirely! They can still work well even with rotations, and I feel that slopes are what made some of the inverted SotN levels feel fresher than they otherwise could have, even if it only felt like a nice touch rather than something that changed up the gameplay. 45 degree slopes work at any rotation with only very basic physics logic. Other slopes would be more complex, but could also be more interesting. That said, a game made up entirely of e.g. square tiles could still be very fun, so if slopes don’t appeal to you, don’t feel pressured to put them in.

NGL to me the biggest appeal of this project is “holy crap you can store each world as just one map and rotate it in-engine, that’s hella cool” :'D

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Sounds like a pretty cool idea! I wonder if it makes sense to reverse the grouping so that you have 8 levels in 4 worlds? So instead of doing rotations of the same level 4 times in a row, you do them over a more spread out timespan. This means that if some orientations are easier, you could just put those in an earlier world so the difficulty is increasing.

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Well finish my finals at 5. June… will have 3 months to test it as much as we like…
You will figure how to make that possibleby then :blush: good luck.

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@eishiya I can’t even explain how all of what you said help, I’m taking most if not all of it into consideration!

@snake153 That sounds like something similar to mirror in mario kart haha, but I think I’ll be sticking with all for levels grouped up at once :slight_smile:

@AHMEDJXZ Well I should have a working prototype of the first level by next week or two!

-:kiwi_fruit::kiwi_fruit::kiwi_fruit:

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