Coalesce Puzzles and Interactions

The focus of this week was on implementing the puzzles created in the previous week and ensuring all of the logic for these puzzles is in place. Several of the puzzle designs were tweaked out of the gate due to limitations in implementation and unforeseen difficulties. I have also created the background image for the levels. This background asset is final, though necessitates several changes to preexisting game objects, such as the light emitted by the ball when heavy, as it makes the ball difficult to see on parts of the background. Issues such as this will be addressed in a future devlog.

Level Implementation

This weeks build is the first build to contain multiple levels, and as such many new features were added including level selection, level completion detection, and the mechanics necessary for each level.

Level Mechanics

The only new mechanic that was added was the toggle trigger. When the player comes into contact with it, it toggles the corresponding bumpers; if bumper was non-interactable, they will become interactable and vice-versa. The animation below shows the ball toggling such a switch in level 4 which is intended to reinforce the idea that the switches toggle bumpers (and not simply turning them on or off).

Several other features were added for clarity, such as the slingshots and paddles lighting up when they are trying to activate. They will do this even when the player is heavy, so even if the ball is not moved at all, the player can know that the obstacles are trying launch them, and will launch them if they become light.

Level Design Changes

Most of the levels are not exactly as they are depicted in the concept art, owing to the game's physics systems.  Bumpers and surfaces have been placed in ways that are either more intuitive in the context of the game or provide an extra challenge where one was lacking. For example, the diamond shaped obstacle was changed to a pill shaped one and placed on an angle so that the ball must hit the bumper directly because hitting the pill obstacle behind it sends the ball in an unfavorable trajectory.

Levels 5 and 6 have changed the most compared to their designs, but the skills they are trying to teach and test are the same. The difficulty was that the ball would often active the trigger at the top of the pin ball machine twice (and this would mean the puzzles solves itself) when falling through it due to how it would bounce off the edge of the top-left most obstacle. Also, it was far to hard to reliably shoot the ball upwards through the hole in level 6, so it is no longer required for level completion.

Level Selection

I decided to incorporate the level selection screen as a title screen to the game. When the game starts the player will greeted with several levels to choose from straight away. Most mobile games barley need a title screen anyway, so I am not sacrificing much here. In the coming weeks, it may be worth "locking" later levels until the player has completed the previous level, as this would be in keeping with expectations of the targeted mobile/browser game audience.

The font being used in the image above is "Vermin Vibes" by Andrew McCluskey. It is free for anything and everything non-commercial and can be found here: https://www.dafont.com/vermin-vibes.font. This font matches the synth-wave aesthetic, so it will probably be used in the final product.

Level Completion

When the player has destroyed all the obstacles in a level, they may fall past the paddles to end the level. This sends the player back to the level select screen. A feedback report would make this transition less jarring, and could include the time it took the player to complete the level which is an idea very inline with the intention of targeting Coalesce at a mobile audience. It is also not clear what the player must do once they have destroyed all the obstacles in the level, so something to clarify that may be a helpful addition. Both of these things will be addressed in a future devlog.