Blog 1: Summer Game Design Ideas Part 1

Summer classes have slowed down progress a bit, so most of the updates for the next few weeks will be scripts. I'm working on the game's graphics in the meantime.

Two events happened last week. The first is SGDQ, and the second is that I got my hands on an android. Both events have been inspiring some new game design ideas, though most of them are not very pertinent to Crown. I'll start with SGDQ, and talk about the Android games in my post 2 weeks from now. I've had SGDQ running in the background while I work on my school and project stuff, here are some of my thoughts.

My favorite run this year was Momodora 4: the commentary was great, the skill displayed was really impressive, the game itself is very high quality, and I got the most from it overall.  I'd love to make a metroidvania game at some point in my life, but I'll need to make sure I have the necessary resources when I try it.
Something more immediate though is a gameplay mechanic the runner described as "last hit forgivance. This means that losing all of your HP won't immediately kill you, but instead grants you one more hit. It hasn't been programmed in yet, but I plan to use it for Crown. I'm a bit wary about adding too many features that make the game easy, but I don't think I've crossed the line yet and games should support the player before the difficulty.
The Dark Souls-esque rolling ability also made me rethink one of Lily's powers in the game. But I'll explain more about that later on.

My favorite type of runs are the races and my favorite genre is platformers, so my most rewatched runs were the DKC Tropical Freeze and Super Mario Maker races. Both games showed off pretty good auto scrolling levels, something that will likely be very abundant in Crown as even the first major bossfight in the game is a running boss. The important thing is to keep the gameplay active and fast, something DKC and the Mario Maker speedrun level designers accomplish well.

Ape Escape is one of my all time favorite games, so I'm happy to see it speedran at a gdq event. The floating ability with Spike's slingback shooter reminds me of Razputin from Psychonaut's floating ability, almost tempts me to add dumb little tricks like that in my own games. That's probably not a great idea, but it reminds me how I love messing with cheat codes in games. Though I've already programmed a debug menu in Crown that I plan to make an unlockable feature for the player, so I think I at least have the fun factor that comes with cheating down.

Honorable Mentions: I just don't have much to say about these.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger: Fun commentary.
New Super Mario Bros 1 and 2: I keep forgetting these games exist.
Kirby & the Amazing Mirror: I've been wanting to see a co-op run of this game.
Ed, Edd, 'n Eddy The Mis-Edventures: Love the show, never seen gameplay of this before.

If you're interested in what I do, here are my other social media pages:

Twitter @Maakole: I tweet whenever I update something here or on my Tumblr.
Tumblr: I made it recently, and don't really plan to use it all that often. But it will showcase art work from my Evanlily game projects, or whatever else I happen to be doing.