Journal Entry 1

Date: 29.4.2024

Activity:

- Designed key elements of my game

- Sketched out some level parts

- Coded character movement

Notes:

I only worked on this project yesterday and today so unfortunately not much has been done but this devlog won't be empty because most of what I did was design so that can be talked about pretty well.

My idea is to create a puzzle platformer and just like any other platformer it needs to have a tight movement. The way movement is designed is also why I think this game deserves to be called a puzzle game. Essentially the player will move with WAD (no S for crouch) but the catch is that each button only moves the player a certain amount (you can't hold the button for "run" or "walk", that won't work in my game). In each level a player will have N moves (where each press of W, A or D counts as one move) and the player has to traverse that level using only these N moves. I hope this creates a nice balance of platforming as well as figuring out how to get through each level with only the moves you have.

For the graphics I want to go for black/white/grey so not to spend a lot of time and effort on that. 

The story for my game is as follows: you will be playing as a ghost (Jeremy) who gets orders from Monster Council. His job is to scare misbehaved children. The problem is that ghosts can't see the real world correctly so you encounter missing stairs here, roof with holes there and so on - that's where the puzzles and platforming come from, you have to traverse these imperfect areas in order to get to the children to scare them. The other problem is that Jeremy is physically disabled... he can't fly very well (hence his restrictions on the amount of moves he can do per level).

So far I managed to code up the movement in unity. I added a feature that limits how far the player can “boost” (multiple moves in the same direction) in a level in order to stop them from just flying across the whole level as this would make the level design super difficult.

Invested hours:

2.5h - Designing the mechanics/story etc.

2h - Coding the movement

Outcome:

So far... nothing