I was going to mention a couple of days ago that what this game really needs is procedurally generated levels, but I was worried that you wouldn’t want to deal with the additional complexity of generating your own levels. But since you’ve already started doing it, I figure I’ll send you a couple of resources that I came across while reading about procedural level generation a while back. I don’t know if you’ve been to this site before, but it has a couple of interesting level generation techniques (one of which is more or less what you’ve already done) but if you have several level themes, it might be interesting to have them have different layouts.

Here’s the site I mentioned: http://members.gamedev.net/vertexnormal/articles.html
The code samples are all for the “accidental engine” which is a 2d engine these guys made to test out random level generation techniques, but they can be applied to pretty much anything, with a little bit more code. The ideas on the page might give you some inspiration for stuff to try.

For example, the type of level generation you have right now is great for a human made structure, like a huge building / dungeon complex, but won’t work as well for more organic areas. For example, if you wanted a cave theme, you may want to take something similar to what you have right now and apply noise to it to give the walls a more jagged look, or generate the level using fractals instead of fixed shapes. If you have an outdoor area, you can generate a grayscale height-map using perlin noise or a similar fractal technique and then have a cutoff value where you place the edges of a landmass, and another cutoff where you place cliffs. This is shown here: http://members.gamedev.net/vertexnormal/squint_fractaltips.html
You have to be careful with that one so that when you generate the noise you have one big landmass instead of several small ones or else you’ll have to determine where they are, and connect them with bridges or something and that can get quite a bit more complex.

I don’t know if you want to go through the effort of making several different level types, but if you do, there are some pretty interesting techniques you can look into. You may be surprised at how big an impact the tileset has on how a random level feels. If you were to put an outdoor tileset on this level generation technique it would probably look really strange, so you have to be careful, and it may be worth it to have slightly different generation techniques for different tilesets. It’ll also make the tilesets functionally different instead of visually different, which will add a lot of gameplay value.

Also, the arrow shooting enemies are awesome, they really force you to think about how you move your character instead of just following a set technique based on the old follow mechanic, so it makes the fights a lot more dynamic. Good stuff

Anyways, I just thought I’d share those thoughts on the level generation stuff, I get really excited by procedural level generation for some reason, so this is really interesting for me.

Hope this helps,

- Mark

I think it might be interesting for a trap weapon if it’s not necessarily something that freezes enemies (though I could make traps that do any type of damage, like an ice or poison bomb) but also have items that slow down enemies in more unconventional ways, like creating a wall of physics objects they’d have to push through. Glad to hear any ideas, as possible improvements that I couldn’t think of was one of my motivations for this cast

I just wanted to say, this is a fantastic idea to have these video diaries, they’re definitely fun to watch, and I’m enjoying seeing the development process, even though it’s just beginning. I have a couple of ideas, one to make the coins look a little bit better, and one for a weapon.

For the coins, I was thinking two things, one that you don’t necessarily have to display every coin that the player gets.. if you have a counter on screen for how many coins each player has, you can just increase the counter, and only animate one coin on screen per 5 or 10 coins that the player gets. That way you can have a shorter stream of coins and can move them slower without lengthening the time the entire animation takes.

In terms of how to animate the coins to be more appealing, you may want to have the coins “explode” out of the enemies, into roughly a circle around them (you can just fire them out with random velocities and directions, with some set amount of drag, so they look natural). Once all of the coins have settled then they can all get pulled into the character at once, that way the animation is more dynamic, and it’s length isn’t dependent on the number of coins/items the enemy dropped.

If you let the coins sit for a tiny bit of time before getting pulled into the player, then they get a chance to see their loot, and if you kill a bunch of enemies at once, then for a brief moment you see tons of loot on screen, which can be pretty exciting. If you pair all that with a nice coin drop sound, I think it’ll have a really good feel.

A fun weapon, although you’ll have to tweak it so it isn’t overpowered in this style of game would be some sort of trap. If you could lay traps down on the ground to lure enemies over them, it could add another interesting dynamic. Maybe the traps should just freeze the enemies or slow them down temporarily and not hurt them so you still have to kill them with another weapon. If you have a limited quantity of traps (maybe they’re picked up randomly as loot) they can potentially be used when you’re overwhelmed by a huge group of enemies to freeze some of them and buy yourself a little bit of time, but b/c of the limited quantity, they can only be used in desperate situations.

Anyways, if these suggestions were helpful, I can try to give you more in the future as I think of them.

I’m excited to try this game, b/c I’m a fan of games of this style.

- Mark