Journal Entry 1

Date: 28.-29. 3.

Activity: Working on project B / Implementing own design from project A

Notes: First, I checked how far and high Ellen could jump and how far could she see. There are a few interesting tricks the player can do, like hold S or D to look further downward/upward (even while jumping), or walk over a 2 blocks wide gap without jumping. Ellen can also normally jump 5 blocks, but if there's 6 blocks tall, one block wide pillar, then Ellen can sort of get bugged a little in the side of the pillar and jump 6 blocks high and overcome the obstacle. If there's as little as one block on the other side of the pillar, this doesn't happen! Ellen can kick a box half a block into the air by standing about half a block or less to the side of the box, and then jumping diagonally toward it - could make for a nice shortcut if the level designer relied on a box pushing down on a switch without interruptions.

When I started building the level, I tried to start from an empty scene, but it turned out to be simpler to copy a scene from the 2D gamekit and remove the tangible game objects and decorations, because the camera, player character and so on are already set up.

The first thing I added was the terrain with the tile palette. When you are trying to build multiple levels of terrain above each other and aren't using platforms that you can jump/fall through, you are constrained a lot in the design, because the platforms need to be far enough apart that the player can walk beneath them but close enough that the player can jump up to the platform above. Pressure plates are a little tricky to place so that they don't stick out and prevent boxes from being pushed over them, but so that they also correctly trigger.

I adapted the door opening script to my needs - each pressure plate *toggles* the state of some doors. I thought I saw a bug once (the door didn't react once, which messed up the whole puzzle), but I couldn't reproduce it.

Invested hours: 3:30

Outcome: Uploaded build with first part of level mostly complete