Riverboat Pachinko – Basics of a Lake

A key part of being a game designer is finding all the ways your players can miss. Even when you don’t have obstacles yet.

I was a bit strapped for time this week, so I didn’t get too far on my little boat project. I did, however, manage to get started on level four.

Level four is going to be based off a lake, and I plan for it to be a kind of culmination of everything so far. Admittedly, there aren’t THAT many mechanics in just the first four levels – but I feel it’ll be good to give players a more open map to play around with the stuff they have learned so far. I have ideas for more involved mechanics later down the line, and I don’t want to ruin the flow of the game by not giving existing ones room to breathe.

I realize that last sentence may be a bit ironic, given that the stage is currently a stagnant rectangle of water, but… eh.

This is how most of my levels since level two have started their life. I have assets and scripts set up in a way that I can block out a map pretty quickly, and then I spend a bit of time testing the scripts. I gotta ensure that the scene elements are hooked up, of course – but also need to make sure the level will load in the sequence correctly. It’s good to get that sort of technical fiddling out of the way in advance; plus, it lets me get an idea of the general space and form of the map, which is always nice.