This week I finished the level selection system and built, playtested, and finalized all of the levels for the first world. With these two achievements out of the way, I feel comfortable saying that Vacuous is around 10% complete.
Let me talk a bit about the design behind the level menu. I love Super Mario World, and I especially love its world map. It is colorfully drawn and tells a story about the game world, but most importantly it fills the game with a sense of adventure and mystery. I have once before tried to emulate what this game captures in a previous game (The Pac-Man, shown below), but had to cut it due to performance and development time issues, resulting in a final game with no hidden secrets whatsoever.
With the map system (if you could call it that) for Vacuous, I decided to focus on both ease of access and yet still allow room for a bit of that Super Mario World-like mystery. I ended up with a concept which I pitched to myself as being "a bingo board combined with a traditional world map." The level select screen consists of a grid of preview tiles such as these below:
Beating a level unlocks all of the levels adjacent to it, giving the player alternative stage options to choose from if they get stuck on a particular level. Some of the tiles on the map are hidden however; these are the secret levels. They are only unlocked and made visible when the player collects a mystery orb in one of the adjacent stages.
Further secrets will be unraveled as the player beats secret levels, though I haven't fully ironed out the details of those yet. However, I do hope to implement layers of secrets, similar to how Special World is hidden behind Star Road in Super Mario World.
Now the fun part of development begins; from here, most of my posts on this dev-log will be about environment art design, game element programming, and level design. I'll also be ironing out some business stuff on the side and get a website up and running.
Also, it is approaching the time when I get a musician involved in the project. If you have any interest in this role, contact me! I'll provide more details privately.
