Devlog - Basic Level Blocking

The main concept of progress in this game is going to be how high you can get, drugs not included. So we need platforms the climb on, and to make it interesting, a sense of difficulty as progress is made.

Now for actually deciding on how to create platforms that can be traversed. We could go for the highly over-engineered process of doing it entirely algorithmically, but there's a slight problem with that. I haven't the foggiest idea where to even start with doing that, and while I'd eventually work it out, that's spare time I just done have. The alternative? Prefabs! Lots of them!

To make sure they slot together, their ends are defined as a certain pattern with three variations, both top and bottom. Then they each have a difficulty rating, easy, medium, and hard. Wasn't much point in going beyond that in granularity without defining some clear "difficulty" grading rules, so these are just graded off gut judgement. To allow for enough variation between the difficulties and end variations, 27 prefabs have been created.

Difficulty distribution was relatively simple, we just want it to get harder as we progress. Trouble with that is linear progression is boring, so we need some level of randomness, but not so much as to destroy a sense of progression. Soooo, we add two graphs:

This all comes together to produce:

Platforms only join to those with the same ending cap, difficulty trends to increase but is slightly random, and on top of that, we delete platforms after they get far enough away from the player!

Next up: Pick-ups and enemies!