Somehow we managed to do some work over the holiday break. Mostly we have been working on level 2 and continuing the quest to implement the educational aspects of the first 3 levels.
The second level is about minion control. It shows the player the differences between the minion and the philosopher and how to use both of them to accomplish goals. As usual I will share with you the original sketch I made of the level, that is barely one step above a napkin doodle. Remember that the player can control the philosopher as well as any minions under his/her control but the player can only move one character at a time.
okay so the thought behind this level was to create situations that highlight the differences/advantages of the philosopher and the minion. The major differences between the two are size (minions are smaller), speed (philosopher moves faster), and jump height (minions jump higher). We might add more differences later, but for this level these are the ones we are working with. In this first half of the level all of the platforms are too high for the philosopher to jump onto. So the player has two options; the minion is smaller than the philosopher and jumps high enough to make the platforms, or the philosopher can jump on top of the minion and then jump again onto the platform (like leap frog). If the player jumps onto the platform with the minion then there is a button (the bright blue box) and when the minion stands on it a ladder will appear and the player can control the philosopher to get him onto the platform. If the player thought to just skip all of the opportunities to go to higher platforms then the player could walk to the right and try to go through the door in the bottom right. When they got to the door they would realize the philosopher is too tall to go through and only the minion is short enough to go through. This was intended to get the player to understand that the philosopher and minion are different sizes and therefore are used for different things.
This is the second half of the level. The only difference that we had not showcased at this point was the difference in speed. To achieve this we created a series of things that fall from the sky and would squish the minion if he tried to run under them, but would not squish the philosopher.
The heavy things were an opportunity to put humorous things in the level! To the left you can see some of the ideas for heavy things. Initially I wanted to use a safe, a piano, and an anvil, but now I have a couple of other things in mind, like elephants and anchors so we will see what is more fun to model in 3D .
The main goal of this level is to teach the player how to use the philosopher and minion(s) effectively. Because this is the case we are not sure if this level will have a scoring matrix that is split up by philosophy. We might implement one later, but as of right now we want the focus of the level to be the minion actions rather than what each specific philosopher would do.
That being said we are still teaching the player aspects of his/her chosen philosophy in this level. In the last post I mentioned that we were working on creating educational bits of information about each philosophy. The idea behind these is that the player will only see ones pertaining to his/her chosen philosophy and that they will be worked into the layout of the level, rather than being in front of the screen. The tips should give the player a clue about how the philosopher would act in that level and future situations.
It has taken me some time to figure out how to communicate aspects of each philosophy. It was difficult to figure out how to say a lot about each philosophy with a small space and a few words. I have a list of what the player needs to know at certain checkpoints to score the maximum on the scoring matrix; I am working backwards from that to create the small bits of information and where to put each one. Hopefully next week the list will be close to complete so we can talk about that.
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