Lake Mouth Pinball

This week, I had a plan for my little boat game. And that plan was… to make a plan. And then I made a bunch of other stuff on top of that.

A week ago, I finally reached the point with this project where I felt I had done enough prep that I could move on to trying out new content. I already had ideas for further game mechanics, so it would just be a matter of implementing an testing them.

I started out by breaking all my ideas down by complexity – both for the player, and for me to implement.

I took all of these things, and drafted up a sequence of 8 more levels – each designed to introduce further mechanics from the list. This would let me test out my ideas practically, one-by-one – in roughly the order I’d want to introduce them to players in game.

From there, building out stage 3 was relatively straightforward. I used probuilder to build out a narrow lake – a more open environment than previous maps to reflect the progression of the game.

Originally, I was planning to just have this map introduce the stagnant water zones – with a large, current free area for players to consider when launching ships. After testing a bit, I decided that wasn’t quite enough, and added a few bumper buoys, to add some fun (and dumb) elements to gameplay.

Going forward, I’m going to be polishing this level some more, and moving on down my list of features. No timeline at the moment, but I’ve started looking into itch.io, and putting out some sort of public demo. I’ll get there when I get there.

Thanks for reading!