College Project: Skills Gap 1 - Part 3

The last level I'm doing this week is themed around 2 The High Priestess. (Link to Part 1) (Link to part 2) As the antithesis to the magician, the key words for the priestess are “Non-Action”, “Unconscious Awareness”, “Potential” and “Mystery”.

Looking at the Minor Arcana, the best fit for this level would be the Four of Swords. Its keywords being “Rest”, “Contemplation” and “Quiet Preparation”.

With this thematic framework I thought that this would be a great place to introduce a new mechanic that would cause the player to think about their actions differently.

Keeping to the specification of “Four of Swords”, the obstacles would appear four swords at a time. And like in the card, one of those swords would be golden. Unlike the other swords that would just deal damage, the gold one would apply an effect on the player and protect them instead.

The form of protection would be like the Midas touch and turn the player into gold. When gold the player will move much slower, but if they are hit, they won’t take damage and instead turn back to normal. This way the player will have to consider not moving as beneficial as opposed to dangerous.

As an added challenge the swords appearing ahead would be shrouded in darkness, only being revealed momentarily. This way the player would have to plan their route ahead of time.

This is partly inspired by Mario Maker dark levels and this one attack Asgore uses in Undertale.

This sword design is deliberately simple, but through post-processing effects and the level’s darkness they will look much better.

On Friday I also received some feedback from my classmates, notable of which is:

· The background is wasted space, having something there or some dynamic movement of the camera would improve it.

· The way some sprites clip is bad, and the collision is unclear.

· Taking damage isn’t very visible, could use a dynamic effect or clearer colours.

I’ll definitely work to improve the game using this feedback, but I won’t have time to do so within the constraints of the skills gap. Something I’ll do during the Christmas break for sure though.

Creating Level 2

Firstly, I set up the ordinary sword obstacle. All I had to do was replace the sprite from the pentacle with the sword, replace the circle collider with a polygon collider and the spotlight with a freeform light.

The gold sword was slightly harder to implement, but I was able to implement the mechanics by interrupting the damage script with a new “damage” type.

While working on the light effect on the sword I also changed the global light to shroud the level in darkness and gave the player a spotlight. As part of this I added some squares to reveal and hide the light on the swords:

The layout I went with looks like this:

The first obstacle serves to show the player what happens when they get hit by the gold sword. The middle few have the player try and hit the gold sword to avoid damage, this is then twisted at the end when they instead must dodge the gold, so they have the mobility to doge the last sword.

All of this is done under a shroud of dark with the swords only being revealed briefly four at a time, using well placed trigger colliders:

As a last-minute fix, I made some spotlights for the buttons on top as they aren’t visible on the black background.

Level 2 Gameplay

Sadly, I was not able to upload this as a blog post on saturday, but later today I'll also upload a gameplay video on YouTube and the pre-alpha build on Itch.

I'll link these in a blog post along with my thoughts on the project.