Turtle Molasses

I am thinking about designing a background for this blog that is representative of the game. It could have one color for each philosophy and a design that reflects the game development process. So I will keep that in mind and see what I can create.

Woo hoo! We had a meeting! (all of us!)
We put the remodeled/re-scaled level 1 in Unity. I was worried that we would have to rebuild the level in Unity instead of simply importing it, but that was not the case. hurrah! The main character walks and jumps in the level and all of the objects have colliders. We are also working on animating the platforms that will soon be moving platforms.
Surprise, surprise we changed the scoring for level 1 again. The scoring for this level has been weird so far. Originally we had the score matrix. Remember this?

The numbers represented the order in which each of the actions were preformed. We were thinking about this idea in terms of writing code, but something was off about it. The new idea is to keep the spirit of the matrix (like the order in which the player does the actions is significant) but the process and code is more like the other levels now. Now it (at least in pseudo code) a series of if-statements. In level 1 there are 3 big actions- the chest, the minion, and speed (which is recorded as above or below a certain number of seconds). The game will keep track internally of the player's first and second actions and then perform the following check: 

        if action 1 is minion and action 2 is speed then you are scored as a Kantian 

        if action 1 is  minion and action 2 is chest then you are scored as a Utilitarian 

        else you are scored as an objectivist 

Keep in mind that the player has no idea what score they receive after the first level; the player gets a score (in terms of a philosophy) after each level but they do not know any of that until after the third level when the 3 scores are evaluated together. (This was explained in detail in an earlier post, so check it out!) 

The other thing I would like people to keep in mind is that level 1 is quite basic, hardly anything happens so it it is difficult to categorize certain actions as aligning with the ideology of a philosophy. In reality each of the philosophies is complex and a lot gets lost when you narrow it all the way down to valuing gold or speed or selflessness. That is one of the reasons that we hold off on telling the player anything about the philosophies until a few levels have been played out. The game will get into the deeper parts of the philosophies in the later levels and in those levels we expect that we will teach the player some of the core principles of each philosophy.

 I cannot stress enough that the score you get in the first level is not a good representation of the philosophies and the player (who will learn about the philosophies throughout the game) does not even know anything about the internal scoring for this level, think of this as a secret about level 1 that I am sharing with you, rather than actual information about the philosophy. 

Okay so we are making progress after a lot finals and delays and a family crisis, but the process feels really slow, like a turtle on a lazy summer day who is leisurely walking through molasses.