As promised, weekly gameplay footage:
Going to try keep this post a bit shorter– I had started out this week with a two week goal in mind for setting up a level structure and putting together a little level editor tool to speed up the process of creating new levels.
The first thing that I had to do was sort out a structure that would work for laying out the levels. I came up with something simple that I could build upon later and just hard-coded this little arch level that you can see in the gameplay footage.
After I had that done, I started working on a level-editor tool– and thats when my tires really started spinning. It felt like a lot of work to undertake for not a lot of pay-off. My goal for an early access release is 10 levels. I think I can put together 10 levels that will be interesting enough by hard-coding them so I decided to put the level editor on hold. It was already pretty late in the week by that point as I hadn’t had much time to work on anything, I decided to spend the rest of the time cleaning up a few things and also doing a few tutorials on blender so that I don’t have to rely on fiverr and the unity asset store for everything.
As you can see, I replaced the buildings with something that is really simple. It’s not the best and I’ll likely want to change it later but it is at least a bit better of a fit for the aesthetic that I’m going for. I also made the arena cage a bit nicer using a grid shadergraph instead of using a wireframe asset that I downloaded.
Another thing that I did was put a minimum and maximum velocity on the ball. The game ended up being pretty hard if it didn’t max out, and there were other times when the ball would slow down to a stop. I still need to fiddle with these values because now it plays a little too easy
One funny little regression that you can see in the gameplay footage is that the text “Get Ready” and “Go” text is backwards. This is because the change to how I’ve got the level structured and the grid laid out actually ends up making the arena do a 180 from where it was before. I had been planning on changing those at some point in the future so I might not get around to fixing that before I do.
My goal for next week is a couple more power-ups. Specifically a power-up that will allow you to fire a laser out of the end of the racket.