Hello all,
odamite {l Wrote}:You got really nice ideas there but I think we aren't able to implement them right away. They need to be carefully discussed and planned. For now we are focusing on 0.3 and I think we can use your ideas in following versions.
I agree that these ideas need to be carefully planned.
odamite {l Wrote}:Anyway new blocks would make the game much more interesting and variating. This will also make possible to create more complex stories which are told visually. However I think this game shouldn't focus so much on visual side and story because after all this is a puzzle game.
Having custom blocks/background images can really improve the telling of stories.
But the downside is that they can be "misused", spikes could be covered up as a normal block, the exit (or other) areas could be hidden, invisible blocks, etc...
What we should do is keep it for scenery and leave the core mechanism visible, spikes should stay the danger, no misleading/fake exits.
There's another problem that might be difficult to solve, the new blocks fit in the Cloudscape theme, but chances are that they don't fit in different themes.
If the custom blocks are only scenery, the users can still play the story in a different theme, leaving the gameplay/puzzles intact (but losing some visuals).
odamite {l Wrote}:I'm thinking of adding some scripting in levels to create these kind of "complicated" actions and cutscenes. I'm not meaning that we should implement a flexible scripting language but something much more simpler.
I've though of implementing some sort of scripting before.
A simple scripting system could easily be made by using the setEditorData method of the blocks. (This allows the script to change the blocks in the same way the leveleditor does).
Beside those we can implement some commands for teleporting the player, swapping him with his shadow, kill the shadow?, activate other blocks.
Buttons and triggers (and perhaps portals) will have a new behaviour, execute script, and if needed we could add scripts for events (onStepBlock, onStart).
I don't think more than that is needed.
Tedium {l Wrote}:The last level of a levelpack should "cost" a lot of points to prevent people from skipping too many levels
.
I like the idea of "skipping" levels, especially in puzzle games, but I see one contradiction:
Telling a story and skipping levels.
Perhaps the story should be some sort of travel around
a world. Not visiting real world places, but areas like a forest, a cave, a swamp, a mountain, sky ruins, a dessert, etc...
Each area should be made of a start level, a few (puzzle)levels, boss fight!
Parts of the story could be told in the first level or the last level of that area, the levels in between can be played in any order.