THE HIDDEN TREASURE OF OLD BONE COVE

What Went Right:

The engine was okay to work with, once I got the hang of it. I was able to come up with a lot of different types of gameplay, like puzzles, enemy waves, and platforming. Another thing that went well was that my level felt very complete. I had gameplay, story told through npcs and set design, and areas that trailed off of the critical path to reward the player's exploration. Even though story wasn't my focus, I don't think it was lacking for the kind of level I was trying to make. I think I did a good job of using different parts of the engine to the fullest. I made sure to have bosses and enemies around chests to provide the player with better drops, I tackled platforming segments pretty well, which was really difficult to work with because of how jumping works in the game, and I had a lot of unique puzzles like using the enemies laser to find the right switch or the giant clock puzzle.

What Went Wrong: 

One thing that went wrong was that I lost my entire second level. This wasn't too much of a set back because I already recorded it, but it is upsetting and means that I can't polish it unless I rebuild it entirely. This happened because I was loading between the second and third level while making the third one, and I accidentally hit save as I hit load and it caused it to save over the second level file. Fight The Dragon's file system is not very user friendly, because it does not let you save a level as new, or save over a level intentionally. If you save it with a new name, it just overwrites the first one and changes the name. Another issue I had was that Fight The Dragon has a resource limit per level. This made it hard to add as much as I wanted without having to cut other stuff out. I ran into this more on my last level as that map was the largest, and ended up having to erase most of the water surrounding my level just to save on space. Fight The Dragon doesn't support stacking different types of blocks. This makes it hard to make decent looking arches or platforms, and if I wanted something over water, I would have to delete the water block leaving a hole in the level that instantly kills the player.

Lessons Learned:

I learned a lot about scoping a project. For the past couple of levels, I've chosen smaller games and made a series of short levels. This made it harder to find enough time to get the level to a really polished state. In this project I decided to make just three levels and put two weeks into each, rather than just one week plus minor touch ups. This gave me more time to add extra polish and really focus on each level individually. I learned how to deal with constraints from this engine. The resource limit, height limit, and stacking blocks limitation really made me have to think carefully about each design. My first level went all the way up to the height limit, and I used pits and areas with water to still do sections of the player climbing and jumping across things without exceeding the height. The second level did really well with the resource limit by having puzzles that made the player spend more time in each room, and by having the player go back and fourth for keys using the small space to the fullest without letting the level feel too short. Lastly, I learned the importance of spending more time on smaller areas, rather than using time to make more. The approach of doing only three levels, as opposed to the four I did last project, allowed me to get the base level done, get feedback, and then spend a whole extra week catching things I might have missed at first and using feedback I had received immediately. This led to a more complete and polished final project.