2.5D Platformer — #1 Greyboxing
Objective: Greyboxing an environment that will test out the upcoming features
At this early state of the project, its best to avoid the temptation focusing on the “look” of the game when all that may change later down the line. Yes people love good looking games but right now, you really need to focus on getting the right “feel”. This is why you will see the use of primitive shapes to represents a level, coins and the player.
Right now, my main focus is level design to help test out some of the core mechanics I have in mind for this project:
- Basic left and right movement
- Gravity
- Jump and Double jump
- Moving platforms
- Falling off to the player’s death, respawning
- Collecting coins
- Wall Jumping
- Calling an elevator
- UI for Lives and Coins collected
My first aim is to position the platforms where I can adjust the jumping height, the double jump and gravity. I may even adjust the platform, all so I have the character movement feeling just right. I will then move on to respawning the character when ever they fall off the platform, and so on.
For me, it works well to have a separate scene as I develop a new feature, separate from the main game scene for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I want to test out the new feature right away. The last thing I want is to navigate through a whole level to reach the new elevator caller only to realise I forgot to drop the script on it (yeah you know what I am talking about, Doh!). All I need to do is drop a platform, an Elevator Caller and Elevator and Character and away I go.
Secondly, not working in the main game scene, frees it up for maybe other team members to work in it. It is my experience, that only one person can work in a scene at a time (nightmare when it comes to version control). Yes there are workarounds, but they require expensive tools.
It is good practice for a developer to work in their own separate development scene, get that feature working, check it in to version control and let the game designers play test it in their rightful areas of the game.
Well I am ready to get this project start, let’s do this!
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