Drowning

Bit of a ramble, this one, as we're off out for a Valentines meal, dumped the kids with the grandparents and drinking already but I'll try to stay roughly on point.

Now I've got the water paint working, I've changed the deal with water.

I've always loved games that give you powers that allow you to explore areas that you previously couldn't, so when you gain a new power, you want to go back over earlier levels and re-explore them. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain is my second favourite game of all time and did this superbly. From a developer perspective, it means replayability of levels so less content creation - less content creation FTW always of course.

So when the game starts now, water is deadly. Player just accepts this. I've just finished coding up a slightly different death effect that water causes by making a slower particle burst and a different sound. Initially this involved typing "drowning" into FreeSound on the basis that somebody somewhere probably recorded someone drowning and posted it, but in the end I just took the existing squelch sound, slowed it to half-speed and added echo via the mighty Audacity.

So Player plays game and learns by example that water is deadly. Lots of cool mechanics come from this alone since system already exists for water to change levels, so vertical climbing level where water level chases you, buttons changing water level to access areas etc etc.

But then later in game, Player activates the water paint fountains which spring up all over the game. Some kind of visual cue to where they are going to be, i.e. deactivaed water paint fountains scattered around that do nothing until the water paint is activated make Player want to go back to earlier levels and re-explore with new power.

This is also just one power. Now the visuals of a new power are as simple as changing colour and sound effect, all quite efficient.

Biggest issue now is moving from a linear, level one, level two etc to the challenges of having an open world where you can go from one level to another with freedom. Should each level start in its default state regardless of whether you have played through it? If so, the one existing level is already broken as you can only open the doors from one side. Or should revisiting a level mean everything is in the same state you left it?

The second option is appealing but will involve a complete rethink of how the save system works. It's technically not really a problem to save and restore the state of all objects in a level, but I will have to think quite carefully about how to implement this.

Anyway, think I'm on the right track. Water paint can now extinguish fires and allow Squishy to swim and the fact that you can only have one paint at a time opens up a whole raft of possible puzzles so I think this is the way to lever the maximum amount of play out of a feature.